It’s the Down-side of the Up-side
Amidst all this harping about my lack of images on my otherwise image-obsessed web log, I received an email from England the other day, from my cousin who shares my first initial and last name. Besides the fact that it’s rather strange getting an email from yourself with a .uk extension, my cousin noted that he has some photographs of me from when I was about 10 years old. Finding this kind of peculiar, I started to think about the downside to the web: Family Photos.
Sure, it’s great getting to converse with otherwise long lost friends and family. The web enables us to “chat” from thousands of miles pretty much free of charge. But image poor saps like Britney Spears who are constantly bombared with images of themselves from their “early years.” I would imagine some folks would much prefer to have such images locked into a trunk rather than spread about the web, much like a commonplace virus. It’s “the trunk factor” as I like to call it. So the web gives us all this really great information, some of which would be better locked in a trunk and forgotten for all eternity. Not that I mind old photographs of myself surfacing, but it just got me thinking. One of the things I could post on here is old family photographs and the like. It would be kind of interesting and provide a totally different context.
We tend to think of ourselves in the present tense, our lives are these sort of linear progressions that keep moving forward, despite our best attempt at keeping memories or “well stocked trunks” littering about the place. As a photographer, I have a definate propensity towards fine art photography, almost at the cost of all that which is documentarian. But, as any true photographer knows, we cannot really separate the two. That which is art does document and that which documents is art, even given the circumstance that the same image may make “good” at one bearing the cost of the other. Despite this fact, I as a photographer, love to hone in on the artistic facet of the experience, even at the cost of the documentary, but that doesn’t mean I’m not documenting the world around me as I see it. It’s true, in fact, I have a record of people, places, pasts, memories, and the like, which in some ironic twist of fate, is in fact infinitely entwined with my body of artwork. To separate the two would destroy both, I suppose.
So, I suppose, in true artistic spirit, the down-side and the up-side are one in the same and we should all be thankful for the technology that supplies both of them.
Until next time, this is Carol, the Carol in “Carol’s Little World” signing off.
