Not only are photo albums of strangers fun to look through, but you can also use the photos as cover art for an overrated album of generic preppie rock, and nobody will ever be the wiser.
@ Chris Kuan: Bravo for noticing, once again, Cat’s kinship with Hobbes. We all have a shared culture around certain memories, I guess…
And I don’t much care for photo albums of people I already know, or people who are telling me about themselves, but I have a bit of a voyeuristic fascination with photos that have no stories to go with them. I bought a digital camera at the thrift store the other day, and it had a whole card full of pictures of strangers in it. I kept them, even though they are utterly useless to me.
I’d rather have an album of folks I don’t know. With real family photos, there’s plenty of bad memories, and people I’d rather not look at, not to mention that my family isn’t terribly photogenic.
But with an album of strangers, I can tell new lies every time someone asks me about it. Good lies– fun lies with adventure and tragedy and true love and sword fights. Dinosaurs might be pushing it.
An album of strangers gains value as it gets older.
A good one anyway. A century old, it can give you a window into how people lived in some by-gone era. New, it just shows you a bunch of boring people.
So we see BDD admiring the shades in panel one, then backing away in panel two, and after that… Come on BDD, that’s not just a bad decision, that’s a misdemeanor.
There’s a shop in town that sells used post cards. I want to buy them. They’re clearly all from the same person, and I am interested in what they have to convey.
Also, my friend once posed with in family photo at the Liberty Bell without the family’s knowing, by which I mean he inched in and acted like he was supposed to be there. I would love to find that family photo album.
We have a bunch of postcards and correspondence to and from East Berlin that we found on sale at €1 each. The historical and mundane observations mixed in the voices of this family make a narrative that’s almost impossible to produce artificially.
August 27, 2010
I disagree Boy. A photo album of strangers is more or less an issue of National Geographic without all the pithy cultural observations.
August 27, 2010
bad decision dinosaur! I knew he would like the flee market..
August 27, 2010
My mom and I both have a small collection of discarded family/friend photos of strangers, so they must have some value.
August 27, 2010
Believe me, TripleG, cultural observations (read: snarky comments) are there for the making.
August 27, 2010
“Now we are haggling about the price”. Excellent…
Also, Sombrero! What fun is it being cool if you can’t wear a sombrero?
August 27, 2010
I can emotional attachment? AWESOME.
August 27, 2010
Wow, Chris Kuan, talk about emotional attachment. What is a complete Calvin & Hobbes collection worth?
August 27, 2010
Not only are photo albums of strangers fun to look through, but you can also use the photos as cover art for an overrated album of generic preppie rock, and nobody will ever be the wiser.
August 27, 2010
What’s emotional detachment going for these days?
August 27, 2010
Is that an Ozymandias trophy I spy on the table?
August 28, 2010
@ Chris Kuan: Bravo for noticing, once again, Cat’s kinship with Hobbes. We all have a shared culture around certain memories, I guess…
And I don’t much care for photo albums of people I already know, or people who are telling me about themselves, but I have a bit of a voyeuristic fascination with photos that have no stories to go with them. I bought a digital camera at the thrift store the other day, and it had a whole card full of pictures of strangers in it. I kept them, even though they are utterly useless to me.
August 28, 2010
I’d rather have an album of folks I don’t know. With real family photos, there’s plenty of bad memories, and people I’d rather not look at, not to mention that my family isn’t terribly photogenic.
But with an album of strangers, I can tell new lies every time someone asks me about it. Good lies– fun lies with adventure and tragedy and true love and sword fights. Dinosaurs might be pushing it.
August 29, 2010
Fraggle Rock?
Over privileged cable teevee child!
August 30, 2010
An album of strangers gains value as it gets older.
A good one anyway. A century old, it can give you a window into how people lived in some by-gone era. New, it just shows you a bunch of boring people.
August 30, 2010
So we see BDD admiring the shades in panel one, then backing away in panel two, and after that… Come on BDD, that’s not just a bad decision, that’s a misdemeanor.
September 1, 2010
Truly worthless things are more precious; the wealth of the world cannot touch it.
September 1, 2010
There’s a shop in town that sells used post cards. I want to buy them. They’re clearly all from the same person, and I am interested in what they have to convey.
September 1, 2010
Also, my friend once posed with in family photo at the Liberty Bell without the family’s knowing, by which I mean he inched in and acted like he was supposed to be there. I would love to find that family photo album.
September 1, 2010
We have a bunch of postcards and correspondence to and from East Berlin that we found on sale at €1 each. The historical and mundane observations mixed in the voices of this family make a narrative that’s almost impossible to produce artificially.
September 24, 2010
No, a photo album of strangers can be a pricey work of contemporary art.
November 25, 2010
one mans trash is another mans treasure…
June 10, 2012
I do believe I see a reference to a joke I know.
Bob: Alice, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
Alice: Gee, I guess I would.
Bob: How about two dollars?
Alice: What do you take me for?
Bob: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over price.
But you guys’ve probably heard that one before.