A lot of people in college had their pictures as a screensaver. The monitor would go black and pictures of their friends would pop up. I kind of envied the library of photos they had to display. Not all of them were memorable shots, but shown in succession, they made up this patchwork of one’s social life and relationships.
I hardly ever took pictures of people; hating to have my picture taken, I projected my preference onto others. But I really like taking pictures, ever since I got my first digital camera in late 2002. Now I have a library of photos, and a widget on Google Desktop that cycles through them. Mostly travel pictures of places I’ve been.
Now that I’ve been taking pictures steadily for five and a half years, I wonder what the motivation is. It’s nice to glance to the right side of my desktop and recall a place I’ve been, how I got there, what it was like when I was there, but beyond that, I wonder what my drive is to attempt to capture a place with a photograph. There’s a lot of answers (to create something of beauty, to have a memento of a place, the enjoyment of doing it), but none of them quite fit. «»
