I was on Google Photos today, looking at all these old photos from the past. Old friends, old loves, etc — and it was kind of a strange experience.
Here are all these people I haven’t thought about in years, or perhaps even a decade — but with unlimited free cloud storage for photos/videos— social media and these tools resurface old memories from the past.
Now my question is this:
Is this feeling of nostalgia bad? Does thinking of the past (or resurfacing it) hold us back?
I think so.
Forget in order to create anew
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I love the notion of “tabula rasa” or the clean slate/blank slate philosophy. The idea that everyday we die, and are born anew.
How do we create new things?
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I personally think that this “creative destruction” notion holds true:
In order to create new things, we must destroy the things from the past.
And perhaps in life — we must also forget/destroy the past in order to live, create, and dream anew!
Is the purpose of photography to capture memories, or to create artwork?
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Another peculiar question:
Is photography a tool for memory recollection, or for art creation?
Obviously photography can serve multiple purposes — but I’m starting to think to myself:
What if photography could be used as a tool to forget, in order for us to move on with our lives?
Nassim Taleb has a nice quote that goes along like, “Some people write to remember, I write to forget”.
What if photography could be used as a tool of forgetting?
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Similarly, I like to write to empty my mind. I wonder if photography should be the same? Photograph to digest life experiences, in order to move on. Which means this:
Photography shouldn’t hold us prisoner as stuck in the past. Perhaps photos are better served to help us think more about the future, and our future aims!
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Forget in order to create anew, and for you to become anew!
ERIC