Pictures of the old age: from the photographs to images of memory: a methodological and cognitive way

Abstract

The proposal of "Pictures of the Old Age - From the photographs to images of Memory: a methodological and cognitive way" is to develop an oral and visual descriptive study about memory of images - they are photographs chosen by elderly people who gathered, selected and analyzed them. Its goal is to boost the methodologic project which began as a mastering dissertation that was thought to bring up a double examination: a) to what extent the images besides enabling us to think would also be shapes of thoughts that have their own thinking capacity when linked to one another; b) to what extent still we could based on a precise observation of the setting up of the material (images) by the elderly determine the memory itself and its configurations that were accumulated during the life span, when a simple glance makes us contemplate somebody´s life’s trajectory and history. This study was organized in a double perspective: 1) Anthropological-communication about the images representations chosen by five of the elderly people an away of evoking and synthesize their life stories and the complexity of their passage rituals. 2) Examining this time the oral and visual records observing how these people choose and organize the shapes and patterns (images as shape) and also how they deal with assembling of the images sequence in order to transmit and perpetuate their own existence. In this double perspective the proposal presented here is an attempt to explore the configuration of the memory in the old age: what does it keep, change, create, organize perhaps alternate. (AU)