P.178
“Photography have (sic) been crucial in constituting the very nature of travelling and gazing, as sites turn into sights, they have constructed what is worth going to ‘sightsee’ and what images and memories should be brought back.”
What else should we bring back? Sadness and stolen objects? I loveheart tshirts? Caps? Wine and liqueurs? Toblerone?
Is there not here some obscene injunction to travel AS SUCH. Just to keep fucking travelling and travelling and not reflecting? There is a kind of dull, high modern morality about this distaste for the memory to be reflected on. The idea that we should act, rather than think, again.
I wonder how it will feel to photograph the set of the BBC TV show “Rome” in Rome? Which is the more, or less, authentic? And what does it matter? Am I more or less likely to be struck by a lightning bolt of sin or divine illumination in one or the other? Why would Caesar’s palace be any different to Caesar’s Palace? And any more or less likely to promt a passage a l’acte as opposed to merely an acting out?