to have an archived existence
"look[ing] at [my life] as a set of potential photographs" and diary entries, or whatever susan sontag said
although i dont want kids, i often fantasize about showing them younger pictures of myself. heres your mom with her first boyfriend who introduced her to a version of los angeles she only imagined. heres your mom at her favorite music festival when she was 16 and unaware that shell never love music as much as she did then. heres your mom when she first moved to nyc and spent every thurs-sat drinking until she puked her brains out. heres your mom on an island with the actual love of her life who she stopped drinking for.
it would be utterly chic and truly artistic of me to have a physical, tangible visual archive: scans, prints, polaroids. something i can hold in my two hands, something i can rub and feel in between my fingers i pray to go back in time. it was miss intellectual susan sontag who once wrote, “to collect photographs is to collect the world,” and i want to collect it all!
i do have a very small one from when i was a teenager interested in ~vintage~ cameras (honestly, truly thanks to dianna argon’s character in i am number four). but most of my photos exist on my phone and somewhere up in the cloud. surely im not alone in this. the digitalization — and more importantly, the instagramization — of photography changed the way we produce and consume images, making them omnipresent and in doing so, turning them into passive ideas we mindlessly scroll through. we no longer devote a vigilant eye when coming across one nor place immense value on the ones we execute. now we snap snap away, choose one worthy of likes to share, and let the other 100 replicas take up storage space.
since enjoying the craft and vision of photography (and videography), ive always wanted to be someone who consistently documents my life. to sentimentalize experiences, my existence. this desire ends when i realize people are really bad at taking pictures of me. how do they not know my perfect angle is above and slightly slanted like scene queens? i can just take pictures of my surroundings and relationships, but then it becomes a purely observational act. a life that encompasses me more than the life i lived. continuing with sontag’s “on photography essay,” “photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.”
or as modern philosophers might argue, pics or it didnt happen.
im constantly stuck between wanting to ~live~ in the moment and wanting to ~capture~ said moment for eternity. i want to live my life to its fullest potential, not wasting a second caught up in its perceived framing. i want to have something to look back to that transports me to a specific time, reliving the exact feeling over and over again. even more, i want to have live a life like the artists i romanticize, even filling those watching with envy.
since im a writer (i’m a writer btw like .. did i mention i’m a writer ??? idk if u guys like know this but i write sometimes, no biggie it’s jus like i’m a Writer ….), one would think that in place of a visual archive, i might have hundreds and hundreds of journals chronicling every second of my life in excruciating detail. the insides would consist of lyrical musings on my inner and outer world a la joan didion, anaïs nin, virginia woolf, etc. instead, i have like three half-filled ones with a majority of pages saying something like “i hate my life and i want to die.”
its not that im suicidal, its just im a self-proclaimed sad girl who feels too much and only remembers to write in her diary when shes feeling like she hates her life and wants to die. i also have a very small vocabulary and have not figured out an elegant way to say “i hate my life and i want to die.” there are absolutely occasions when i love my life and i want to live, but i never reach for a pen when those instances occur. its easy to complain and turn myself into a victim, much harder to rejoice in the realization that this is the life i always dreamt of. even harder to accept that thats the case and yet i still sometimes hate my life and want to die. cue pretty sick’s self fulfilling prophecy.
im slowly starting to change that — mainly because im convinced semiotext(e) will one day ask me to write a memoir and i will need to remember what happened in my life to get that done. writing about the little specificities will help my craft, perhaps even turn it a bit poetic! although that may not even matter because nobody reads and everybody prefers the idea of a writer much more! maybe it’ll even help me enjoy the mundane parts of my life as well! like how the trees along my walk to work change from pink to green to orange before falling off so i can crunch them. a physical, vibrant rebirth. a manifestation of time passing, similar to the one i crave to have.
i even bought a 2002 digital camera on ebay. i swear i wanted one before everyone got theirs because im oh so waaaaay ahead of the trends and oh so not like annnnny other girl. then it became too predictable and i couldnt bring myself to make the purchase. but alas i submit as im determined to make this substack an early aughts blog. and just like jotting down every second of my life, possibly through this new lens, i will find everything a bit more appealing. again with sontag, “it hardly matters what activities are photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cherished.”
however, while making these changes, im afraid im spending too much time thinking about how my life will be perceived rather L.I.V.I.N.G said life…….! the moment i decide to record something, it’s changed forever — time erupts. im no longer in the present, im in the future nostalgically looking into the past. “haunted by,” according to sontag, “tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.” but is it possible that this is when youre enjoying life to the fullest — the seconds in your life where you’re like, yeah….. i love my life and i want to live?!???! this might just be an inherent symptom of gen z’s Romanticize Your Life manifesto i naturally succumb to as a ‘98 baby, but hey remember, i may be CRINGE but at least i’m FREE <3
this meant a lot to me lol