Photography and memory are an inseparable pair – sometimes it seems that we cannot have one without the other. Photography operates not just on what one sees, but also on the way that it relates to memory – both individual and collective, generic and specific. Right from their earliest advertising campaigns, Eastman Kodak used photography’s link to memory as one of its marketing strategies – a summer holiday, a wedding or a child’s first steps somehow became more ‘real’ if they could be referred back to through an image. But can this really be possible? Probably not, but it can seem that way through the photographic image’s inevitable evocation of memory and emotion.

Famously, Roland Barthes described how photography infinitely reproduces a unique event that comes to take on significance through the fixing of a moment. Sometimes, such an event will not even be significant, but somehow photography will make it so by enabling a memory to become a reference point. Memory is predicated on chance and serendipity. It comes, goes and becomes reinterpreted with time – everyone constructs their own realities. For example, Roland Barthes’ well-known photograph of his mother in the Winter Garden means one thing to me – it represents an important theoretical analysis of what photography can communicate. Yet it means something very different to him – it portrays the essence of an individual. A single photographic image does not stop working if you close your eyes – it comes to occupy a space in the mind, butting up against thoughts and interpretations.

Photography of people and places can sometimes replicate the emotive power of music. Music is something that goes far beyond language. Try explaining why a certain track makes you experience happiness, sadness or nostalgia and you find yourself talking not about the music, but about associated emotions triggered by sounds. Whether a trashy pop song or an orchestrated aria, music has a strength beyond its notation. This slip into subjectivity is impossible to articulate but is also difficult not to experience on a regular basis. It is in this space that Jamie Macdonald’s photographs operate – they balance in an ‘objective location of subjectivity’. A tautological statement, but it seems to fit. In an earlier project entitled Ten Years After, Macdonald worked collaboratively with the photographer Hector to create a series of slide projected images. Accompanied by a soundtrack, this work traced the pair’s experience of London over a ten-year period. Both moved to the city in the same year and, although very different, their lives and experiences crossed each other. This powerful work – originally projected on the external façade of the Lux Gallery, London – communicated a sense of discovery and identification with an urban space.

Feel Good is an ongoing project, initially inspired by Macdonald coming across the slogan: ‘Feel Good’, on a billboard at sunrise one hungover morning, while driving through London. Martin Creed made a work that was shown on the exterior of Tate Britain where neon text proclaimed Everything Is Going To be All Right. What exactly was going to be all right was not spelt out, it was left to personal interpretation. Passing this statement it was difficult not to believe that everything was going to be all right – but that the definition of ‘everything’ was open to interpretation. One cannot help but internalise these impersonal statements to mean something specific and personally meaningful. Similarly, a billboard stating ‘Feel Good’ can inspire a feeling. The intentionality of such a slogan, in this case, maybe commercial but encountered unexpectedly it can resonate in a far more personal way.

MacDonald’s photographs are both effective and affective – they represent moments of importance to the photographer, snapshots of what symbolises ‘feeling good’. The body of work includes photographs both in colour and black and white, small and large scale, landscapes and portraits, and interiors and exteriors. Rather like the fleeting quality of memory, these moments that are pauses for thought partially represent experience. Both recollection and vision cannot possibly represent any moment fully; whether visual or anecdotal, representation will inevitably be subjective. The details of these individuals, arrivals, departures and places depicted in Feel Good are not expanded on. Interaction and interpretation with the photographs are left open to each individual’s own narratives which will be informed by individual experiences and memories. I look at the lights in the tunnel and think about travelling from JFK to Manhattan; looking at the women in the bar, I am reminded of late nights when I should be feeling good but would rather be somewhere else. These photographs are not of these experiences, but they conjure specific memories that belong to me. Macdonald’s images remind me too of films and novels where the narrative is so absorbing, that on leaving the cinema or finishing the book, I cannot really believe that it is over and I find myself inventing my own continuing fiction. It is in these potential narratives and projected links to memory that these photographs work their power.