Identity

Two days ago, in The Photography That Disappeared, I traced what the smartphone did to the economics of the image—attention diluted, the photograph commodified, the decisive moment traded for burst mode. That essay stayed deliberately clinical, and it closed with a promissory note: at the risk of sounding Freudian, or Jungian, there is a second function of photography that has nothing to do with art, and I would come back for it. This is me coming back for it. …

I still type it as “reader digest,” lowercase, the apostrophe and the capital letters missing. My fingers reveal what my memory conceals: I never studied this publication, I absorbed it. It arrived in Spanish, as Selecciones, and it sat on the tables of my childhood the way furniture does — unremarkable, permanent, load-bearing. Decades later I live in the country those pages described. I did not plan this in any way I could document. And yet I have come to believe the magazine was drawing a map the whole time, and that my body, eventually, walked to the place my mind had already been living. …

My friend is Spanish. He was born in Toledo in the 1970s. He is not responsible for anything that happened in the Americas in the sixteenth century, and he knows this. What he did, over coffee one afternoon, was offer a symbolic apology — on behalf of something he did not do, on behalf of an institution that no longer exists in the form that did it, acting on orders issued by monarchs dead for four hundred years, which resulted in a catastrophe that reshaped the world I came from. …