Our discussion yesterday about photographs of the D-Day landings and how they enable us to experience what those individuals experienced got me thinking again about photographs as memes, but from a different perspective than we have considered in the past.  These photographs create and belong to a collective consciousness.  We know how to relate to the depicted because we are humans and share experience and the interpretation of experience with other human beings.  The photograph becomes a kind of glue that puts the events and understanding of events in a chronological context.  And it enables us to relate to our fellow beings.

In this context the role of the image is truly to bind people together and to create a collective consciousness.  This collective consciousness transcends individual consciousness, and that is an important element of what humans are, what we have evolved to. We are meant both to see collectively and to see individual.

While we can certainly perceive abstractions and have the plasticity of mind to accept a stylized painting as symbolic of reality.  The photograph, arguably, represent a maturation of image technology.  The photograph enables us to create images like humans see, to create memes that truly and directly map or relate to human vision.  There truly is a collective vision a fundamentally human world view.  We know how those people in the landing craft felt, because we have, through the photograph, become them.