Mom has been cleaning out the bathtub in her condo, which was full of stuff she couldn't cull when she moved from David's house on Laurel Hill to their condo at the Cedars. Some of it has ended up at my house. Sometimes it's things I'm happy to have, but often it's things that she can't discard because of general decision-making fatigue. Certainly I can't judge her for it, we all experience it every day. And it's why Jeff Bezos has said that he tries to structure his day so that he has to make a couple of important decisions, something like that. Because more than that exhausts us.
One of the things mom brought is photo albums from trips: me in Moscow '87, the two of us in Spain, France and Switzerland '88. The striking thing is how much of it is landscapes and cityscapes and other artsy bullshit. It seemed important at the time. I wanted to demonstrate to others where I had been, that I had been there, and that while I was there I had a "good eye" for important, revealing and attractive things. Some of it is good and there are nice echoes, for example I photographed old people ballroom dancing in the park in Moscow, and Mary would return to the same spot in her Moscow series from '98. Hers is of course much better.
Several decades my pictures are largely fluff. I want to see pictures of myself, my mom, and then other people -- particularly the women I had some sort of sexual contact with -- more or less in that order. I am intensely curious about how I looked -- my clothes (often a little silly), my hair, did I look healthy, did I look happy? It's pretty natural, given how much of a blur it is to me now.
But there aren't that many pictures of me, because I thought pictures of people and especially of myself were vaguely uncool.
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