Photography is often linked to memory as an issue of its failure. While the question of what is missing or what cannot be seen in photographs emphasizes what might be called a negative relation to memory, this nevertheless obscures the productive role of photographic images within culture as mnemonic devices. This paper addresses the specific contribution that the invention of photography has made to the relation of memory and history. The consequences of photography on these domains are as important for photographers as they are for historians and critics.

It is May 1933. A young and impoverished New York photographer who speaks no Spanish arrives with his cameras in the streets of a Havana seething with revolution and tit‐for‐tat violence, in the fading days of a brutal dictatorial regime propped up only by the money of American banks and corporations. In his notebook, he writes: “a bus full of spys, counter spys [sic], plain clothes men, secret agents, and ordinary thieves. … No American takes a bus in Havana. ‘They’ would suspect something and follow me. And of course everyone who is seen near Fernandez de Castro's person is immediately filed in some official card index, somewhere; then shadowed … Havana was full of uniforms: Black armed men … and men in tan with heavy, shouldered guns. It was all to keep their master gangster in power – the only way. … [Havana] is a frontier town still, and half savage; forgetful and unsafe. … When you are still bewildered you notice more things, as in a drunk. I was drunk with a new city for days.”1