Someone favorited one of my pictures on flickr this morning. It was a nondescript photo of a package of rohu fish taken at Dragonstar market in St. Paul in 2009. I have no idea why the photo was of interest to them, but I paged through a bit to remember that I photographed a wide variety of fish packages there, during the few months before I left the Twin Cities and moved to Syracuse. I wanted to save a few reminders about the things I loved most about the the place I spent around five years in. I felt more at home there than I’ve ever felt anywhere.
Paging backwards, I found a photograph of a banner on an apartment complex on Dale street advertising an “automatic fish scaler” not far from Dragonstar. Venturing further still down memory lane, I found this photo taken looking back at the highway from Eichten’s Cheese and Bison. The fish photos were well viewed in the seven years or so they’ve been online; rohu fish apparently have been searched for over 350 times. But this lonely bison by the side of the road, just a ways down the road from the Franconia sculpture park outside of Forest Lake (where I used to drive to buy live fish all the time) had only been viewed five times in seven years.
There’s a sort of loneliness to public exposure. I haven’t been taking pictures for a long time, other than little household memories. I guess it’s because no one really seemed to want to look at them anyway. No audience for quirky observations in the real world. People search for what they need rather than having much concern about what other people find interesting.
So much for the “interactivity” of electronic communication platforms. It’s not a platform for self-expression, really. It’s just a place to file things, with the random hope that some stranger might stumble upon them.
