Question (or is it a rant?) for today
In terms of Man with a Movie Camera Manovich writes, “Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular order become a picture of modern life – but simultaneously an argument about this life, an interpretation of what these images, which we encounter every day, every second, actually mean.”
With personal photos, there was a ritual: you take photos, you remove the film, careful not to expose it to light, and take it to a store to get developed. You wait at least an hour to see the photos, after having waited possibly hours to finish the roll. You take your photos out, and you place them in an album. Or you distribute them. Maybe you got two sets to give to your friends. In a world oversaturated with images, sharing one photo with dozens of people has lost some of the mystique of giving one photo to a specific person. Does a personal image lose meaning when it is over-distributed, or does it still hold the same reflexive, and reflective, power? For my birthday this year, two friends printed out photos from a trip, put them in frames and presented them to me as a gift. I proudly, and fondly, display them, and while others may look at them, they can never posses them. While an archive is, for the most part, an accessible database documenting a time or a story or a topic, these photos nevertheless become a personal archive, one rooted in my time. Manovich writes that watching Man with a Movie Camera “is anything but a banal experience,” and yet viewing page after page of photos of babies and trips and outings on Facebook or Instagram or any number of social media outlets renders some of these experience as trite, even mundane (do I sound bitter, perhaps?). And yet, while these may not have much significance past the poster, some archives that have more academic worth may not serve much of a purpose for 99.93% of the population!
While the things we own and keep can be argued in various ways—as a database, as an archive, as a collection—with varying levels of importance, we nevertheless put together a life through images, videos, trinkets, toys, and mementos. Thinking specifically about photos, I’ve often asked myself, why do we take pictures? Why do we collect them? And how often do we keep physical versions of these pictures? Why, for the most part, have we given up our own physical archive for an electronic one that may, in any moment, disappear completely?