Fading prints, vanishing pixels: the ontology of photographic memory

“Previously, erasures and added words left a sort of scar on the paper or a visible image in the memory. There was a temporal resistance, a thickness in the duration of the erasure. But now everything negative is drowned, deleted; it evaporates immediately, sometimes from one instant to the next.”^[1]

What Derrida^[2] says about the word processor, I see in digital photography. Destroying an analogue photo is a physical act. You have to hold it, tear it, decide what to do with the pieces. It’s an act of finality, a small ritual of erasure. Deleting a digital image is different. A few soft taps on a screen, and it’s gone. No evidence. No resistance. No weight. The act of erasing is so effortless it barely registers. And because it requires so little, it feels like nothing at all.

Imperfection lingers in analogue photography. Even as a photograph fades, it does so slowly. Time leaves its mark—creases, stains, dust settling in the grain. The emulsion warps, colours shift, edges curl. Decay isn’t just damage; it’s part of the image itself, part of the memory. Hold an old photograph in your hands, and you don’t just see an image—you see its survival. It has lived through years, through handling, through neglect and rediscovery. Its imperfections aren’t flaws; they’re evidence.

And when an analogue photo is erased, it’s deliberate. A tearing, a burning, a cutting. A moment of destruction with consequences. Digital photography doesn’t age. It doesn’t crack, fade, or wear. It either remains in pristine condition—or disappears entirely. A photo on a phone doesn’t endure; it either exists or vanishes. No residue, no traces. Just absence.

This ease of erasure changes memory itself. Derrida speaks of the thickness of deletion, the resistance of crossing out words or tearing paper. That kind of erasure leaves marks. Digital deletion leaves nothing. One tap, and the image is gone. And with it, the possibility of remembering.

But we take more photographs than ever. Thousands, stored in galleries we barely revisit. The more we capture, the less we seem to hold onto. Photographs were once artefacts of presence—now they’re fleeting pixels, scrolled past, forgotten, lost in the endless churn of digital space.

And yet, deletion isn’t always real.

The cloud lingers. Servers accumulate. The erasure we think we enact isn’t always final. Digital images persist long after we forget them—archived, cached, stored in some unseen database. We live in contradiction. A digital photo can disappear in an instant—yet remain recoverable, backed up, duplicated somewhere we no longer remember. Digital photography exists in a strange in-between state: at once fragile and persistent, gone yet indelible.

This shift from analogue to digital isn’t just about technology—it’s about how we remember and how we forget. If Derrida was right that analogue erasure had weight, then digital deletion is the opposite: frictionless forgetting. No ceremony, no finality, no remnants left behind.

Maybe there’s something to be learned from this impermanence.

Analogue photographs are relics of endurance. Digital ones remind us that nothing truly lasts. Memory itself is unstable—slipping, shifting, disappearing even without a delete button. A torn photograph leaves scraps behind. A deleted file vanishes without a trace. But absence, too, can hold meaning. The question isn’t whether an image survives—it’s whether it leaves an imprint. On a screen. On a mind. On a life.