I am enjoying reading Susan Sontag's On Photography it has lots of interesting ideas that are still relevant today. I like the idea of photographs as a souvenir of daily life, and I am most definitely guilty of in ways inventing my own past with the photos I choose to take and keep and display. Sontag says that 'photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.' A lot of what she has to say raises questions and illuminates our very image driven current world and is interesting viewed in terms of the internet and blogging.
But in the end I just enjoy collecting the world, recording my insignificant life, mostly for my own pleasure, and of of course I enjoy looking at the ways other people invent and record their own lives and experiences.
Where Sontag calls immersion in image 'the most irresistible form of mental pollution' I would like to think of it differently, sometimes I think the small frame of photography helps me to appreciate the beauty of the everyday more than I might otherwise do, even if it does knowingly exclude perhaps it provides something of a focus. I probably am guilty of an overconsumption of images and in many ways a preoccupation with image but hopefully this is something which makes my life better rather than worse.




