Reconstructing a recognizable face is easy: we remember all our friends well. However, a concrete and successful portrait is composed of multiple layered images. No painted image or sustained gaze can separate time from the process of recognition. The instant photograph, however, would seem to be able to do just that in the much heralded decisive moment. But a moment is an eternity at a different scale. Billions of photons arrive in an ‘instant’ and the subject cannot, by definition of being alive be exactly the same at the beginning and at the end of the ‘decisive moment’. So what is then the way we reconstruct a static portrait from timed information?
Possible to forget is an approximation to this question, presenting images that seem to multiply in our gaze, reminding us that perceived uniqueness at our scale depends on reconstructing a convenient fiction. Remembering people we knew, but that we have partially forgotten, requires that our minds reconstruct from scattered partial images a possible portrait, which may or may not fit reality. This imagined portrait, however, is a perfect representation of what we have retained from the viewed subject: a subjective interpretation of lasting emotions and experiences laced with a large dose of oblivion.
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