This is the photo I wanted to post for Kay's birthday, but I couldn't find it. She has included it in every school photo montage I can remember. Now she has access for ever and ever without having to ask me to search for it, which as I have indicated is seriously hit or miss. (You would think that I would know where all the prized photos are, but it is exactly the opposite. They migrate on the random winds of our desire to look at them, and so could be anywhere at any given time.)Pondering the periodic quest to find this picture led me to consider the idea of whether photographs qualify as objects- not in the strict grammatical sense, but in our relationship to them. It's a very grey area. I think that generally, no, photos are representational, of either objects or moments in time (yikes, is a point in time an Object? Freakin' myself out here...) and serve to remind us rather than possessing Objectness in and of themselves*. You know, one thinks of the photo album as the thing to save from a burning building. And yet. There are those examples of snapshots like this one which take on a life of their own, outside of the Thing or Moment or Memory they contain. Kay doesn't remember. This image has become iconic, yet at the same time has stopped representing anything other than itself. The physical piece of paper has been moved and handled and sought after so often that it has certainly attained Object status in my mind.
Curiously, this begs the meta-question: is a digital image of your favorite picture the same as the picture? Ha! That's what she's got now, in any case. Maybe like the Velveteen Rabbit, it just takes time...
*When photos are presented as art, an argument for their Object status is being made, and I guess I'll give you that, although I think that unspoken argument may be at the subconscious heart of the age-old and tiresome conversation of Art vs Craft, journalism photography vs fine art photography, etc etc, boring boring. The idea of Objets D'Art is of no interest to me.
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