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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The urge to document and share is a powerful one

I enjoyed this post from BBC journalist Robin Hamman about documenting his life and uploading it to Flickr. Reminded me a little of Everything is Illuminated, a moving story centred on a young man who is a habitual collector and travels to Eastern Europe after his grandfather's death to find the woman who'd helped his grandfather escape the war. He documents his life by sealing odds and ends he finds in plastic bags and pinning them to a wall.

I spend a lot of time photographing, writing about, thinking about how to write about, and uploading my life - always have done in one form or another but much more now that there's such a wealth of digital tools available. The thing is, I do it to the point sometimes where the documenting of my life is my life, rather than the event or activity I'm supposed to be participating in. Sounds bad, but I really enjoy it.

I think the urge to document and share is very powerful. Just think of holidays where you spent three-quarters of your time taking photos so you could remember all those new and interesting things and show them to your friends back home.

Robin takes it to a different level, though. He's even documented his dinners.

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