forget me not

it's uncanny sometimes the way subjects coincide. for christmas i received a book from kay titled "forget me not: photography and remembrance," by geoffrey batchen, concerning the embellished photograph to enhance memory-- the way the photograph embedded into a treasured momento makes it more saturated for the purposes of memory.

then from chris at bright stupid confetti i was given this link to square america, a gallery full of vintage photographs. one of the most compelling sections of this website is called 'defaced,' all pictures in which faces have been somehow obliterated.







in some of them the faces have been scratched out with something sharp. they seem to belong to a different category than these, in which the faces seem to have been lifted out to put into something smaller and easy to keep with its admirer at all times. these pictures seem less ghostly if we think of the part missing as not a part discarded, but a part kept, even more important than what it was extracted from, even; worth defacing the original for.




and then, on top of this, i'm reading austerlitz, by w.b. sebald, a story about making up one's identity from scratch, from objects and photographs left behind, from scraps of others' identities.







what is it, if not loss, that makes the collector?