Remembering the Future – Angel Albarràn, Anna Cabrera

In the introduction to the book, the Albarràn-Cabrera duo expands on the premise of human thinking by emphasizing our inability to use memory, which is always inherently imperfect, to create “future memories.” As humans, we are unique animals in our ability to plan and imagine the future, but the process of forward thinking is at least as fallible and passable to conditioning as our ability to remember the past.

Remembering The Future reminds us of the necessity and magnitude of slowing down, of quietly observing. It contains only two images of human beings: these two points within the narrative disrupt the visual flow of the book, forcing us to stop, go back perhaps, retrace. They function as an “Ed Ruscha moment,” questioning us about how perfect our thinking actually is, as we persist in believing. The nature of human memory is neither infallible nor timely; it is always subjective, interpretable. Each photograph in the book provides a trace of human existence, feeding the imagination and merging past experiences with the future dreams of each viewer scrolling through the pages.