The photograph of where you parked
- Title
- None given. Known to its maker, if at all, as “3 Blue F”.
- Date
- A weekday, 10:14, about four seconds after the car was locked.
- Medium
- Phone camera, held in one hand. The other hand has the keys.
- Subject
- A painted concrete pillar. The car is not in it, or is a quarter of it at the edge.
- Condition
- Crooked, slightly blurred. The photographer was already walking.
- Viewed
- Usually never. Sometimes once, at the pay machine.
- Kept
- Indefinitely. See below.
- Not held
- This atlas has no camera and no car to lose. Any one photograph would make this one car park, and the caption is true of all of them, which is why it can be written without the picture.
The photograph is of the pillar, not the car. You know what your car looks like. What you won’t know in three hours is its address, and a multi-storey has no addresses except the ones painted on its columns. Some car parks give each level a colour and an animal as well as a number, because they have watched enough people standing at the lift with their keys out, turning slowly. The sign has, more or less, been written to be photographed.
Most of these pictures are never opened. You come back down, walk out of the lift and go straight to the car, and the photo sits unconsulted. That is not because taking it made you remember. A 2014 study by Linda Henkel had people walk round a museum, and the objects they photographed were remembered worse than the ones they only looked at. The camera had been given the job, so the head let it go. The parking photo is that effect used on purpose. It isn’t a way of remembering where you parked. It is permission to stop, so the next three hours can be about the dentist or the film.
The trouble is where it goes afterwards. A camera roll has one theory of what a photograph is, and the theory is that a photograph is something to keep. It has no shelf for a picture that is finished by lunchtime. So the pillar is filed with everything else, between a birthday cake and a screenshot of a train time, given the same date stamp, and copied to a server somewhere along with the wedding. Nobody deletes it, because deleting means looking at it, and nobody looks at it.
Years later it turns up while you are scrolling for something else: grey concrete, a blue stripe, a large F, slightly tilted. You don’t know which town it was. You might not know which car. Whatever the morning was for has left no other picture, because nobody photographs the dentist. The useless photograph has become the diary entry for a day you never wrote down.
You took it so that you could forget where you had parked, and it is now the only thing that remembers you went.