My trip through the northern part of the South Island was enframed by my children memories of visiting these places during my summer holidays. I kept on getting flashbacks that had little accord with reality. This image of Queen Charlotte Sound was my only attempt to represent my memory using the camera.

It probably worked because Queen Charlotte Sound still looked the same from a boat as a couple of decades ago.

memories of...., originally uploaded by poodly.

It raises questions about the image, or rather what we mean by what we mean by “image”. W.J.T. Mitchell remarks, when we speak of images, we might well, “speak of pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas.” He suggests we think of images as, “a far-flung family,” encompassing the mental, optical, graphic, sculptural, architectural, verbal, and perceptual

The underlying meaning or concept of the “image” that we usually employ when talking about pictures relates to a notion of the image as “likeness,” or “resemblance”—the image-type that Mitchell places at the very root of his family tree. The idea of the image as “likeness” need not suggest some crude form of mimesis, of reflecting or mimicking or mirroring an external reality since interpretation and memory is involved.