1) Time Past and Time Present
I like to see what the past really looked like. Even a single picture of the past opens a window into an otherwise unknowable world. A series of pictures leading from the past to the present opens a door. Leaning forward, I can sometimes see a path down which I can walk.
2) Change
I like to see how people change, outwardly, over time. In some way, it means that there is hope.
3) Meeting and Hope
I like to "encounter" people who have represented their lives publicly. They say many things, but among those many things they seem to say through the act of historical or autobiographical visual self representation is this: "I accept myself as I was, as I became, and thus as I am." Or else they are reaching for that kind of self acceptance and self knowledge. Either way, there is beauty in it.
4) Historicity and Meaning
I like to see evidence of historical consciousness in the world. There is too little of that I think. To see representations of personal history, makes it seem possible that human history as a whole also matters. Personal history is a kind of gateway to human history, an affirmation at the most basic level that history, the sequencing of events and experience, matters and reveals meaning. I think that I might believe (if I believe in anything) in the truth that reveals itself in the many faceted reality of history. I think that there is a sense in which history is in fact a kind of revelation. Alternatively, perhaps it is only a dancing screen of images and randomly swirling leaves upon which we can project our desires for meaning. But, whether a real locus of meaning, or an imagined one, I often feel that to see individuals struggling to represent their own history meaningfully is to be in the presence of something important.
5) Curiosity
I wrote and went online with my own visual autobiography and, having done this, I'm curious to find out in what category of human beings I have placed myself.
6) Empiricism
In spite of my comments above about fiction and non-fiction, I do like to think about the relationship between the two, and to contemplate where the border in fact lies. The problematic status of photography is fascinating. My own site is a documentary effort, but the images have been subtly manipulated. For example, identification numbers, signatures, and other details have been removed from many documents. Or, for example, pictures have been cropped so as not to use without permission the images of friends I am no longer in touch with. Furthermore, I have selected one image, and rejected another. I have linked these images together in a story that I claim (both to the reader and to myself) is a simple factual representation of my life. But I have also told the reader (on the "welcome" page) "my goal is to say nothing false. I have not told everything that is true. In any life there are many things better left unsaid." And so I have used photographs to create a kind of text. Although my purpose is documentary (and I would derive no personal satisfaction from my autodocumentary unless I believed in its factitudinal nature), nonetheless the reader is left with a puzzle. Does the photograph, in the age of Photoshop, deserve any privileged status as a representation of historical reality? In a practical sense, perhaps it does, because the amount of effort needed to misrepresent my own life would be vastly greater than any reasonable person would want to bother with, and I believe myself to both be, and seem to be, a reasonable person. But at the limits of the possible, and with sufficient budget and determination, fictions can be created with images too. Text is not the only way to create a fiction. In theory a person might seem to be anything or anyone. With or without photographs, "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog." Images of a person, and thus in a sense (but only in one sense) a person herself or himself, might be created out of whole cloth. I can't imagine why anyone would do such a thing, but the mere fact that it is possible makes it inevitable that someone will do so eventually. And when they do, I will probably link to that fictional visual representation just as readily as I have linked to all the sites above, and you and I will be left (and already are left, because of the theoretical possibility) to contemplate the extent to which there is a human reality beneath the surface that flickers across our screens. |
