Photography | memento II

These mementos take the form of a series of postcards written between a future visitor to Nay Pyi Daw once it has become just like another state capital: a tourist attraction. Written in the style of Italio Calivino’s story-telleresque voice of Marco Polo in “Imagined Cities”, these postcards aim to capture the initial means of proliferating photography to the masses that has now, in the 21st century, gone into hyper-drive with social networking and internet. However, postcards will always have a more intrinsic connection to the places we’ve been and seen than any digital photograph due not so much because of the image, but because of the medium itself. Each postcard not only has the handwritten qualities lost in our digital era, but also the haptic and random qualities of something much touched and used. These postcards call into question our relationship to images and places that through our voyeuristic consumption may one day make into icons.