Friday, January 18, 2008

Palace Pier, Brighton


Palace Pier, Brighton
Originally uploaded by rooruu.
A winter day years ago; there was something simultaneously grand and shabby about the Palace Pier.

I scanned a collection of print photographs recently to upload to Flickr - this being one of them (if you click on this then head over to the set called "The past is another country" you'll find the others.

It was odd, as I looked through them, to wonder how my memory was moderated by the photographs. If they've discoloured a bit over time - maybe gone pinker with some sort of effect from their album storage, for instance - how much will that make my memory recollect it in the colours my eyes see now? I put some of them through auto-enhance, which did change the colours a bit. And I looked at the results, and wondered if the enhanced version was actually more accurate. Winter light in England or Ireland was from the cooler end of the spectrum, rather than the warmer, cold in colour as well as weather. This photo came up bluer, and that's probably more true.

The photos are also, truly, snapshots, captured moments, a tiny proportion of the time, and the spaces between are largely forgotten - the drive to Brighton, train to London, touring the countryside, negotiating city crowds. It's all too much to remember, and yet how much also we do forget. So then you come back to the photos, and let them be spurs to memory and springboards to recollection.

This blog, too, is just snapshots - how do you sum a day in a photo or a few lines? And yet time slips past, and our blogs catch something of our lives and days. I enjoy reading others' blogs, and glimpsing their worlds, different to my own. The creativity of Posie Gets Cozy, the knitterly madness of Yarn Harlot, the inspiration of decor8, just to name three.

(and right now I'm too lazy to reedit this in blogger and bung in the links, but googling 'em up is easy).

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