Can we imagine a world without photographic images? Can we imagine what a newspaper would be like without images or Facebook without images? Photography was born in the mid-19th century, and since then, people have included it in their daily lives for varied purposes and in many diverse ways. It is truly difficult to imagine today’s world without photographic images showing us daily life or recent global events.
Currently, with the vast digital photographic equipment easily within our reach, photography is closer to us than ever: we live in an image culture and use it to interpret our reality.
According to photographer Richard Avedon, photography is a way of speaking more intricately and profoundly than through words. Therefore, when observing a photograph, we are generally creating meanings from the photo itself through an internal connection with our emotions, experiences, and concepts of reality that are stimulated, allowing us to interpret the photographic image as a reality.Our photographs serve to create internal connections and stimulate neurological areas that, upon receiving this visual stimulus, allow us to access, explore, and interpret our feelings and emotions. We can even revive memories that were believed forgotten and that, in some way, may or may not affect a person’s behavior and cognitive processes.
Thus, just as music affects multiple areas of the brain at both cortical and subcortical levels and activates a very extensive network with broad functional coverage, photography can also do so, particularly in the stimulation of brain areas related to memory, such as the amygdala.
Therefore, we are faced with the almost ritualistic fact that people take photographs of all the events in their lives, perhaps to help memory recall significant, emotional, and inspiring aspects of our lives.
It is important to distinguish between therapeutic photography and photography as an aid in the psychotherapeutic process. Photography as a therapeutic exercise relates to the search for one’s own process of self-discovery or artistic purposes, especially when the camera is used as an agent of personal or social change. On the other hand, photography applied in the psychotherapeutic process is related as a therapeutic tool to help people through visual stimulation and the oriented guidance of the psychotherapist.
Judy Weiser, director of the Photo Therapy Centre in Vancouver, tells us: The photography techniques applied in the psychotherapeutic process use the patient’s personal photographs, which serve as a visual catalyst to therapeutically evoke relevant memories and information unconsciously contained within the images.
Images always contain information, stories to tell and share; they evoke thoughts, feelings, and significant memories in people’s lives. When viewing an image, a person gives it a different interpretation and associates their own cognitive and emotional content, and based on this, we can carry out cognitive and behavioral restructuring work.
Photography is, therefore, an important psychotherapeutic tool for those with greater difficulties in processes such as grief, dementias, or any situation that demands a deep stimulation of our memories.