Why Collect Photographs?

All of us collect something. Possibly a collecting pastime survived the crossing from child to adulthood - stamps, badges, buttons or coins, perhaps. Once you pitch an eye over the personal spaces (office, home, car) of friends and acquaintances, or even scan your own life-haul, you testament heed patterns of acquisition and evidence of taste. Feasibly you have a sporadic further multiplied V-necked jumpers, handbags or varieties of herbal tea? All evidence of the inner collector. Our collecting habits can range from the trivial to the bizarre from expedition tickets to fridge magnets, or even extracted teeth.

When noticing differences or oddities in the material world it is appealing to collect and remember. Souvenirs serve to remind us of briefly visited places and whether prone to making images ourselves then our cameras seem to devour views and observations from across the world. When a collector becomes more conscious approximately the very deed of collecting then the process seems to become more pure and a collecting style, along with a system of organisation, government and retrieval, begins to develop. Ultimately the collector becomes the august owner of an archive. A place where each treasured addition can be cared for and stored, maybe one-day all the more shared to disclose a unique individual perspective.

Photographs are a pleasure to collect. We all collect them in some shape or form. Haphazardly in expressive phone galleries or carefully in family albums. But beyond such personal collections the images that we adoration reflect our diacritic esthetic taste. We affection one image extended than another in an exhibition, we conceive one advertisement for a campaign works still better than the preceding attempt and we animus the photograph that someone nominated for a prestigious award. As collector you are judge, jury and advocate of a particular path to imaging the world using the art of photography.

Starting a collection of photographs is something special because it's all about taste -what you like about the world of appearances. In appendix to commercial or speculative reasons for collecting, the soul of a good collection is quite simply the taste of its purchaser. Your taste.

So why cook you thirst to collect photographs? Cause you indeed want to make a contemporary photography collection? Or, engage in you longing to decorate the walls of an apartment or office? Displayed images can be worked into an environment to accurate a personality or cast a lifestyle nevertheless go back putting a picture in a frame says: 'I adore this', so be sure that you do.

You may yen to collect for other reasons, conceivably to serve as keeper of the key images of your time, or that of a by-gone era, and stow them away in a private and personal archive. Personal collections can comprehend anything from expensive artefacts (such as erotic daguerreotypes) to press prints or now photographs. They can be cared for as a private concern, a secret indulgence. Hidden treasures that are waiting for the conscientious possibility to be shared or exposed by an editor or curator who is curious about your taste and the photographs you have gathered.


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Kevin O'Connor is the curator of Gallery 1839 London, set up to encourage the collecting of in fashion fine craft photography. You are perfect receive to browse our organization of international photographers work and we are very happy to demystify any aspects of collecting photography you may have, so please visit us at
http://www.gallery1839.com
kevin@gallery1839.com

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