This is from Satin Island by Tom McCarthy:
"Bronisław Malinowski, the father of modern anthropology, said: Write Everything Down. That was his First Commandment. You never know (he reasoned) what will turn out to be important and what won’t; so capture it all, turn it all into data."
It is useful. But in the modern world it seems like you can't help but write stuff down. Your emails, your documents, your thoughts, they seem to archive themselves. I always, always wish that I'd taken more photos. Not of sunsets and birthdays and loved ones, I've got loads of those. But of moments and colleagues and little victories. Of offices and corridors and car parks. The places where I lived a lot of life. Partly because these things come in handy when you want to talk about them later and sometimes that's a professional necessity. But partly because I want to remember that stuff.
This, for instance, was my office in the Dekum Building at w+k for about two years in the late nineties. It was a fantastic office. But these are the only photos of that whole part of my working life. It was important, if only to me.
This also brings to mind a splendid bit of Susan Sontag, which seems both a bit elliptical and a bit circular. “A photograph could also be described as a quotation, which makes a book of photographs like a book of quotations.”
