Thursday, November 26, 2009

for here or to go

I found this in Portland at Really Good Stuff where I got a lot of new things for drawings-- photos of course, but mostly in the form of scrap books. I'm totally pumped about them-- one of them is from a family whose first cousins I have school pictures of already (weird). I also got a bunch of just loose pages. The photo here is one of two in a small squashed book I found-- the rest of the pages are totally blank. I like the scrapbooks I have where photographs are obviously missing, having slipped out or been extracted by prying hands before I bought them. These spaces are really provocative to me because they call for insertion. I'd like to draw the missing photographs, or insert photographs from other family narratives (maybe even my own) in their place. Nearly all of the scrapbooks I own now are from the 70's and 80's-- the era just before I was born. I'm particularly interested in this time period because it seems like all the events that happened in my family are directly causal to my existence. Which, now that I wrote it, really sounds quite self-invested and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. Anyways, I like these small books because they are portable-- the bigger scrapbooks are really not-- they're pretty much the most unwieldy objects ever made, as if intentionally crafted to sit on a coffee table or human lap and never leave.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You and your use of photos are the primary reason I've been asking people not to throw away their old photos but to send them to thrift shops or wherever. Some place artists like yourself can find them.