What the Heart Remembers: Photo Collectors |
Olivia, our granddaughter, said, “If there isn’t a photo, it didn’t happen.”
This may be a bit extreme, but to some, photography freezes time with an immediacy no other medium can match. A photo is an imprint of something that truly exists: a person, a place, or a gesture. To accumulate such images is to collect moments that survive.
The neuropsychology of collecting helps explain why photographs, in particular, exert such pull. When individuals engage with pictures that evoke emotion, whether joy, nostalgia, melancholy, or fascination, the amygdala and hippocampus often activate simultaneously. The hippocampus retrieves or simulates memories; the amygdala reacts to their emotional importance. Together, they produce a sensation of reliving.
Owning the image allows the collector to “replay” an internal state at will. This gives photographs an unusual capacity to anchor memory and stabilize emotional experience. For older adults or anyone sensing the acceleration of time, photography offers an externalized sense of temporal control: a way to hold on.
This idea aligns strongly with research by Kislinger and Kotrschal (2021), who argue that the human attraction to photography stems from hunter-gatherer tendencies. Instead of assimilating berries or tracking prey, modern humans gather images that serve as visual tokens. They represent the........