Photography, Memory, and the Car Park Image

The parking garage is known as a very regular space. They are typically standardized multiple story structures. For the driver they have entered an alien environment not designed with them in mind. The average driver can find it hard to remember where they have left their vehicle. With the ubiquity of the camera in the smartphone many drivers use their camera as their mnemonic device. I will look at this as a practical memory tool as well as see how this relates to how we use the act of photography as form of memory. Questions addressed in this paper will include, how is space depicted in these photographs, is there an understood conventionalization to such images and do we refer back to the images when finding our car? These questions will be addressed from a theoretical and experiential perspective.