“To Collect Photographs is to Collect The World”

From reading the section Plato’s Cave from Susan Sontag’s On Photography I have been considering the idea of photographs themselves as the physical specimen rather than the subject of the printed image. The quote shown above really stood out to me, this idea that owning a collection of photographs allows you to own real life pieces of anywhere in the world from anytime since the photographs invention. You are not, in photography, limited by the places you have been or the things you have lived through, a photograph is a piece of history and can change or create ones sense of place. To explore this idea I went to a shop that had a vast collection of old photographs and by photographing them, I felt as though I had taken the history of not only the people in the images but the physical history of the photograph with me.