The exact truth for us does not exist. There is only the truth of each moment. The moment in which we live and in which we invoke our memory. When Federico Fellini says he doesn't know if his films are autobiographical because he's not sure if what he says actually happened or if he invented them and then sorted them out in his memory we have to believe him. It says nothing but in a superlative and impressive degree the freedom of my memory. They help me to stimulate it to awaken it but they leave me free to interpret it according to my needs and my endurance at every moment. The letters on the contrary come relentlessly with the power of an irrefutable testimony to prove that very often what I had settled in my mind was not exactly so.

The letters do not allow us to live our saving lies. With the conditions e-commerce photo editing that our memory chose. They do not leave the function of selfdefense that protects us from the always dubious truth. But it is due to this selfdefense that we do not remember more than we can bear. The abstract dimension of photographic memory therefore lends itself to falsification. When these falsifications become conscious and controlled without of course denying the percentage of truth that the photographic image always contains we begin to timidly enter the space of creation. And from where the random photo stimulated our memory we come to the point of using the falsified memory in advance to give birth to a memory product that stimulates our imagination.



Historical research of course since it deals with collective memory cannot have the luxury of altered memory nor can it accept the selective intervention of the historian's personality. That is why the use of photography as a research tool cannot be separated from the accompanying and interpretive discourse that documents it. However if the historian also accepts the uncertainty and ambiguity of memory and thus of historical truth then without accepting falsification he will introduce into his work the valuable dimension of constant doubt. When the Emperor Charles Quint died he held on his chest the portrait of his beloved wife which Titian had made without ever having seen her.