I've been posting some old images of the River Murray on Flickr as I prepare to fly to New Zealand today via Melbourne. I'm not sure why I'm posting these images from the film archive ----maybe I'm expressing my Australian roots as a counterbalance to returning to my primeval Zealand roots in the South Island? Or is it to protect me from any desire to return home to New Zealand?

Identity is different from roots and in a market society the former is signified by style, fashion, taste and wealth, even when a tourist:

Appearance--looking fashionable and stylish--is the identity of the fashion industry and its ethos of beauty is celebrated by the market. It is not the identity of a creator of images or a collector with an keen eye for urban archaeology and modernist art. From this perspective identity is less about about how we look, and more about the production of images, how good these are, and what they signify in our culture.

Identities come and go. We live with multiple identities as we now constantly reinvent ourselves in both work and leisure.

One identity, for example, is that we could, as creators, are involved in a visual opening up to what lies around the everyday habitual world that we pass through and treat as a backdrop for the self's movements and experiences. Then we find that tourism has packaged what lies beyond the drab everyday with great and wonderful experiences that it sells to us at great expense.

Comments

Posted by: malcolm Enright | April 13, 2008 9:14 PM