As junior Ellie Knott sits on the plane to her next destination, she opens one of the only apps that can work without Wi-Fi or cellphone service — Photos. As she scrolls through her extensive camera roll, she aims to delete photos in order to free up storage on her phone. Yet in the process, a photo catches her eye, one that brings her back to the exact moment it was taken.

With over 5.4 billion photos taken around the world every day, Knott’s experience is common. Using camera rolls to capture special events has become ubiquitous. While photos serve as a snapshot of people’s lives, they can also transport someone back in time.

Kija Lucas is a Bay Area artist who uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage and inheritance. She said she values photos for their ability to bring back memories, citing a particular example of a Polaroid picture uncovered during the holidays. This particular photo depicts Lucas’ younger brother looking upset after discovering an unfortunate fact.

“My older brother and I had decided that it was time for our younger
brother to learn some difficult truths about Christmas — it was far too early for him, and not the place of his siblings who were just 2 and 4 years older to share this information with him,” Lucas said. “I still feel a pang of guilt when I see this image.”

Although people do take photos to remember the moments they are living in, the act of taking a photo can have its own affect on memory. A 2021 study by Binghamton University found participants who photographed art remembered it more poorly than those who just viewed it. The participants
who took photos of the art had impaired memory when it came to visual details of the artwork and the meaning of the piece.

As far as memory recall goes, however, photographs do trigger memories. According to Joshua Sariñana, a neuroscientist with his Ph.D. from MIT, photographs can serve as memory storage and, when viewed, can activate memory recall.

Still, a study by Iris Blandón-Gitlin and David Gerkens warned using photographs as memory retrieval aids can significantly increase the likelihood of false memories. Lucas said she can see how this would be true.

“A photograph might trick our brains into thinking we are looking at the thing in the image,” Lucas said. “That is also something I think about a lot in my work — I often say that a photograph is a great place to lie, because it is always assumed to be the truth.”

Regardless of research, though, many people still use their camera roll as personal memory archives. Knott said she usually takes photos of big events or places that she wants to remember.

“I don’t take photos to remember the place, but more the happiness I felt when I was there,” Knott said.

Similarly, freshman Kishan Chokshi said he uses his camera roll as a way to connect with others.

“I often look back on my camera roll to show other people the funny things I’ve captured,” Chokshi said. “I only actually take photos of things that might be of interest to not only me, but others as well.”

More than a photo archive, Lucas describes her camera roll as a snapshot into her brain.

“(It’s) a scattered mess of screenshots and interesting or funny things I saw and will probably never look at again, except when I am looking for something else,” Lucas said. “A lot of images of beautiful light, memories from trips or times with friends, a lot of images of my art I texted myself from my computer to post on Instagram and old family photos that I scanned a long time ago.”

For Chokshi, his photos serve as a digital collection of memories that can be shared with others.

“Personally, I often sort of groom my camera roll in a way so that when I show it to other people, like my friends, it appears silly,” Chokshi said. “I think it shows that I care about social opinion.”

While photos can hold lighthearted memories, they can also hold more complex ones as well.

Lucas said it is because of photographs she knows what her great-grandparents, who passed away years before she was born, looked like.

“Family photography can keep us connected from far away as we move further from one another,” Lucas said.

“Photos can help us to see and understand ourselves and how we have grown through our lives, to understand that our parents were people before we existed.”

Not only can photos help bridge gaps between families, they can also help connect strangers.

“They look into the eyes of a stranger from across the world,” Lucas said. “Sometimes that stranger is related to us. We might understand how our people from another time or place dressed or lived. We might see how their homes were kept. How a neighborhood was before it changed.”

Inspired by the idea that tangible things can hold memories, Lucas created Objects To Remember You By, an art exhibit where Lucas would photograph volunteers with objects they wanted to be remembered by.

“I started to wonder what it is that people hold on to, why it is we carry these things through our lives — these things are sometimes beautiful and sometimes burdensome and sometimes a mix of both,” Lucas said. “I show this work as ‘The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy’ and in doing so, bring into question whose stories get told and what objects and stories are considered valuable and worth holding on to.”

Through her lifetime experiences with photos, Lucas said photos hold an unexplainable significance in our everyday lives.

“Perhaps that is where the power comes from,” Lucas said. “A photograph can bring us back to a time and place, and I think it is important to have them in order to remember times, places and people — including versions of ourselves.”