Amy's post left me reminiscing about my ramble on the moors a few years ago. They're such a beautifully liminal space in literature and in the landscape. These are a couple of pictures I took of the hills beside the Bronte parsonage back in 2006.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the function of photographs outside of art museums. I don't take as many pictures as I used to, and I'm trying to decide if I should be taking more pictures, fewer pictures, or if I should just not worry about it. I love the idea of getting a really nice camera and learning how to use it for real, but even then, what do you do with all these digital pictures? Most of mine are filed away neatly on my hard drive and brought up on my screen only when I am feeling incredibly sentimental and nostalgic. This, I have decided, is no good, but I am not a scrapbooker and don't want to become one. Maybe I should just save up some money, print off every picture I can, and keep them in albums? What do you dear friends do with all your photographs? And what purpose, if any, do they serve in your life?
3 comments:
oh, this is so true. my camera broke a few years ago so i just rely on the kindess of friends. and yes, they're just stored on my computer. i went through one year where i printed out pictures and put them in a scrapbook. but i only pull those out when i'm nostalgic so...maybe they serve the same purpose as a digital archive? only they're actually physical and won't be lost if your computer crashes? i personally love having the physical album in my hands.
i have a friend who somewhat despises photographs because he claims they destroy the magic of a moment (or at least, the magic as documented by our memory) - and maybe i fractionally believe this? i feel like photos can act as a) great documentation devices and/or b) art (duh), but are limited by a rather demanding two-dimensionality. (quick side note: one reason it's frowned on in the hoity toity art world to paint from photographs is because of the inherent flattening effect of an image from a camera lens). what i'm really trying to say is that documentary photos fulfill a nice purpose in pointing towards certain events and helping us remember that oh, yeah, i used to have that awful haircut or oh, my, we sure had crazy fun that summer, but they can simultaneously flatten our memory: that hazy stream of images full of selective details, or even half-imagined details, that can make our past so plastic and beautiful.
i like holding pictures in my hands, or looking at them digitally, but either way, it's impossible to say that they're indestructable. mostly, i put pictures in the category of old journals and entries, only putting a few select images around me to remember that i am made up of a million different memories, but that the million shifting moments of colors and sounds and smells around me are usually what i need to be paying the most attention to.
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