Artefacts

This is the scatter of Polaroids taken by the people who made the Dereliction Walk with me last week in London. These are… fragments… things that caught their eyes. These are… collective memory… artefacts… memories and mementoes.

I ask people to take the photos not because of the thing left at the end, but because giving people a camera and just ten shots of film is a good way to help think ‘so what’. What should i look at, what should i remember?

Lot’s of things that we do create artefacts: a nice mean out create the artefact of a receipt when you pay for it. And a course may create the artefact of a certificate. Friendships may give us artefacts of jewellery or birthday cards. Similarly, jobs give us artefacts: ID badges, uniforms, even tattoos or scars.

Our homes are full of these things: memories made real, or gathering dust. Sat in my office in see a scattering of these things on my shelves: a cap from a NATO visit, a mug from a university, a stone from a volcano and a book from a friend.

Polaroids give us an artefact ‘in the moment’, but not fully synchronous like a mobile phone. You still have to wait a bit.

You choose what you want to snap, frame it, then click. And out pops the photo, which you wave around until it’s developed. On cold days you have to tuck it into a pocket to warm it up enough to work.

Out of all these things, the framing is what matters: it’s the intentional act. The story we wish to capture.

I have a box full of my polaroid photos: i bought my first camera for £20 from a camera shop in San Francisco, picking it out of a whole draw full of a tumble of the things, all second hand, redundant, discarded. The first film cost more than the camera.

Perhaps our brains work like a polaroid: capturing fragments, perspectives, snapshots that we retain.

#WorkingOutLoud on learning.