Your Personal Fetish

Look at your photo albums.  What do such annals of experience represent.  Each photograph is a snapshot of a time and a place that you have personally been a part of, in a way which is so much more vivid and real than any photograph can portray, and yet we all snap shutters and confine swathes of our visual life to a proxy memory.  Is there a sense in which we feel we were never really there if we don’t have a photograph, hard evidence that we were?  

Whan an individual dies, they carry all their memory of place, time, and people with them.  If they chose to record nothing, tell nobody anything of their lives, and take no photographs, then to all intents and purposes, they never really existed.  “If a tree falls in a wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound.”  Time carries on, birds sing, plants sprout, and everything is the same as it ever was.  But even if we do record our lives, take photographs, perhaps attain fame and become the star of films, magazines, and the collective culture, our story is still destined to die out somewhere along the passage of time, when the last photograph has crumbled, the last people who remember you die out, and society finds new icons to raise up.  Why then are we so insistent on making a record of our own lives; of fetishising our own existence?  Even if people do remember us after our deaths, we will not be there to experience our posthumous fame, and as such we might as well look to the span of our lives and forget how we are remembered after it.  The Roman emperors, in a bid for historical immortality, had their faces put on currency, their figures frozen in marble, and painted into frescoes, and yet most of us have far more images of ourselves in circulation than any emperor was able to muster.  None of this will matter when we die, the knowledge that we will be remembered after we die is only of any value to us whilst we are still living, when we could find many more positive ways to gain gratification.  Christopher McCandless, the American who went on a personal pilgramage into Alaska in the attempt to find peace and happiness, scawled out as a last message before he died of hunger, “Happiness is nothing if not shared.”  His personal realisation that in many ways his life had no meaning when not thrust into the fire of society is common to all of us who feel the need to ensure other people experience our humanity, either through our personal contact, or through spreading our image in the medium of photographs, writing or music.  

Photographs represent for us the need to be cemented into society, to prove we exist, to prove to ourselves as well as to others that we have experiences, that we love, we hate, we feel.  We are incapable of trusting our own memory, or of accepting how hugely insignificant our lives are to the world at large, and to the passage of history, and as such we fetishise our own experience.  Part of our frustration at society is that it does not realise  quite how important we all are, that the grand story of your life that you live out and annotate with photographs will never be as important to me as it is to you.  That’s just the way it is.