It's difficult to imagine a trip with no photos

It's difficult to imagine a trip with no photos, because memories lose clarity far sooner than pictures.

Let's talk about collections. If the collection is given its context and meaning through narrative, it is also the physical artifact of experiential memory for the collector. Specifically, it is that which illuminates memory with a physical trace of the past experience. The photo album then, is the ultimate collection of past recorded experiences with a meaning that is contingent on the memory that they spark in the spectator. The memory may be grounded to the photo where it would otherwise float and become exaggerated. The point remains however, that if one takes a trip without photos there are no artifacts. Remembered experiences remain but their shape and image may no longer be grounded by the real.

What then remains of the trip with no photographs? An ungrounded form of memory prone to slippage through boundaries of meaning. In other words, there is no collection to give context through narrative but the narrative remains and loses focus over time.

If we are to apply the photograph analogy to Banks or to other early science travel writers, the most pertinent question might be: What happens to the narrative after prolonged absence from the collection? If I were to dig out an old photo album now and try to describe what was happening in each picture, it would be likely that in the excitement of narrating I could largely exaggerate events that actually happened, or that I could actually imagine experiences in order to give context to certain photos.

I remember flying to Arizona with the Academy of Finance at my high school. I remember spending two days in seminars at a hotel. I remember travelling to the grand canyon. I remember renting a van to do it, and I remember the people that were with me. Beyond this information, any narrative attached to that trip could derive a great deal of information from my mood and from which emotionally and socially tied responses triggered by the event I choose to share. For example:

I remember that two of the girls with me on the trip made me go swimming with them the first night. If I were talking to Kellan, I might say something like "Oh dude they were totally into me," and let my imagination take over. Were I to recount the same experience to my own mother my memory might prove slightly different. However neither memory is really more correct than the other because the truth of the matter is I have no idea if those two girls were into me or not, and no way of knowing.

Here's where it gets crazy- if I did see a picture from that trip (and I do think some exist) I would realize that back then I was overweight, nerdier than I am now, and had bad style. That's just the way pictures from that era resonate with me. From here, a different version of the same story could arise. "Oh dude, they probably felt sorry for me cuz I was the only guy on the trip..."

The point remains- narratives are never grounded completely, but physical artifacts and collections can at least place limits narration (if only to influence them in other ways). Motivation and context are hard to remember, and experiential intricacies perhaps just as hard. What remains is the abstract physical action- the action interpreted abstractly. I went to Arizona. I went to the grand canyon. I went swimming the first night.