Collecting The Uncollectable

Reflecting on Kayla Bauer's Artist Talk

  

On her portfolio blog, after comparing photography to collecting the uncollectible, Kayla writes this:

Any images photographers make are about themselves (some more so than others). The decisions of composition and design and not to mention what they choose to examine closely all tell something of the photographer’s character, their desires, and their hopes

Kayla's photographs tell of somebody who clings to moments, and clings to meaning- that is something I relate to, and it's something that blows me away about Kayla's work. Her unceasing collecting of images, even images of images, starts to create a greater sense of thingness for photographs than I think people recognize on a daily basis, with digital and phone photography so prevalent. 

(I cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on with this paragraph, so if anybody has any ideas please let me know. Maybe the words are just shy.)

I often think of photographs as the things pictured in them. It's proven, at times, not to be that reasonable for me to assume that everybody experiences things similarly to me, but I think I can say that there are probably lots of people who also think of photographs this way.  By taking so many photos, and at times taking new portraits of pre-existing photos, Kayla shifts the focus of her photos away from what she is photographing, and onto the entity of the photo itself- physical or digital. She is "collecting the uncollectible",  creating tangible forms of memory that in turn ponder on the lifespan of memories, the value we attach to memories, and the significance of the things we remember.