The risks of relying on one photo to capture all of a person

At its most accomplished, photographic portraiture approaches the eloquence of oil painting in portraying human character, but when we allow snapshots or mediocre photographic portraits to represent us, we find they not only corrupt memory, they also have a troubling power to distort character and mislead posterity. Catch a person in an awkward moment, in a pose or expression that none of his friends would recognize, and this one mendacious photograph may well outlive all corrective testimony; people will study it for clues to the subject's character long after the death of the last person who could have told them how untrue it is. 

When only one photograph survives, its authority is unimpeachable, and we are in the position of jurors who have to decide a case based on one witness's unchallenged testimony. Within my own attic archives, I can think of a picture that, if it were the only surviving photograph of me, might provoke some descendant to write: "She was a pinched, humorless woman, evidently incapable of enjoying any worldly pleasures. It is tempting to think that the beauty celebrated in the photographs she took was a means of externalizing the rapture and wonder she obviously could not feel within herself.

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015), p. 308

Family memories in stories

Language does this to our memories—simplified, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces to moment it was meant to capture.

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons (Penguin Group): 2013), p. 48.

It can be better not to rely on memory!

[R]ather than relying on memorizing often out-of-date facts, and still usually only half-remembering them, embrace the idea that we have the Internet at our disposal, with search engines at our fingertips that enable us to search for any fact we need anytime.

This is already happening. A recent paper in the journal Science finds that people are coming to rely more and more on search engines rather than their own memory. When the study was released, many people fretted about this and how it is hurting our brains and making us dumber. While this is certainly a common argument, I took away the opposite conclusion. Paradoxically, by not relying on our own memories, we become more likely to be up-to-date in our facts, because the newest knowledge is more likely to be online than in our own heads.

Samuel Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (New York: Current, Penguin USA, 2012), ch. 9 (citing Betsy sparrow, Jenny Liu & Daniel M. Wegner, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips," Science, vol. 353, no. 6043 (2011), pp. 776-78)