Please Call, Very Sentimental

Photos are the tangible manifestation of memory. Our instinct is to run back into the fire or fight against the flood to save them. I began considering our emotional and physical attachment to photography after going into a thrift store in rural Manitoba. Among the furniture, crocks and oil tins, I found a Ziploc bag containing over 200 photos - the record of one family's experiences, spanning about five years in the 1940s. They were purchased "All for 10xx." For the most part, there is nothing exceptional about them. They capture bits and pieces of days; quite normal and boring things. It's our attachment that makes them interesting. Woven into the shots of babies, pets and self portraits is love, anticipation, longing, loss; the pull of family and home. The soft, faded prints seemed an ideal form for such attachments: their cracks and lines, their smell. Hands had torn and taped them back up. They had survived the world for over 60 years; appropriate vessels for the clumsy, imperfect, fagile-yet-strong predicament of being human. In an age where photos are increasingly less tangible - where a thousant unedited digital memories lives in a cell phone shoved into a pocket or thrown into a purse - what does this change in our relationship with photography mean? For all the advantages that mobile technology affords, it's hard to imagine these expendable plastic devices as the vessels of our collective memory. As I discovered on places like Craigslist, often people who lose cell phones couldn't give a damn about the thing itself. Desperation bubbles out of their posts in lonely, sad and charming vernacular - manifesting itself in all-caps, emoticons, and effusive punctuation - pleading that we "please call, very sentimental."