It is in the pictures

Back on the shop floor of undergraduate education: spent four hours yesterday at CPH reading through a massive 187 pages of take-home exams in preparation for today’s seminar. The seminars in turn worked out fine and now I just have to give some detail comments on each individual paper...

However, before starting with those final comments I took a minute to download the few pictures I took in Las Vegas from my digital camera. None really turned out. Not that I am surprised considering the amount of bad luck I had in other regards :-) Anyway, taking into account that I have 1,208 pictures from my summer trip to the US in 2005 and 1,563 from the trip last fall it may not be such a disaster after all. But it made me reflect on digital pictures in general and the way we use them as cognitive signifiers of who we are.

They become short-hands of what we experience, where we have travelled and (sometimes a bit too) blunt indicators of the lifestyles we want to be associated with. Yet, by their sheer numbers, digital pictures have a certain brutality which set them apart from their analogue counterparts, obviously only professional photographers would have had 10k+ pictures in the past. I guess it reminds me of weblogs and posts like this: supply > demand.

But thanks for commenting on my last post Johan H. So true.