Page 116 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 103

People who ‘collect’ photographs seem to fall in the same category as collectors of art,
as distinct from people who may have a collection consisting of thousands of personal
photographs in albums or (equally common) shoeboxes. The couple looking for
frames for their collection of sea images were not ‘collectors’, since they were dealing
with a small, finite selection of pictures. On the other hand, the woman who buys
every print she can find by a particular artist and keeps them for herself may be seen
as a ‘collector’. But what about the woman who has saved all the postcards she has
ever received – is she a ‘collector’?
Surprisingly enough, even Erik, a 26-year-old music journalist with a collection of
more than a thousand records, had doubts about classifying himself as a record
collector in the light of what he designated as ‘more devoted’ collectors. In compar-
ison, Victor gave the impression of a more secure identity as a collector by giving a
straight ‘yes, definitively’ answer to the question as to whether he regarded himself as
a collector; a response that seemed grounded in his participation in an extensive
network of special media, second-hand markets, clubs, web pages and other channels
of information exchange for record collectors. Elisabeth, a 51-year-old journalist,
who together with her husband had a record collection of ‘a hundred old vinyl
records and about fifty or seventy-five CD records’, on the other hand had no doubts
whatsoever that she was still not a record collector, since she was not devoted to
collecting records and did not buy more than three or four a year.
Classifying oneself or others as collectors has a phenomenological as well as a social
side. This was revealed by both Victor and Erik when it came to collecting records,
but also by Elisabeth when she described herself as a collector of miniature houses.
Each of them had a distinct experience and memory of what aroused their motive or
instinct to collect. Victor described it in a comic way as ‘love at first ear-sight’, while
both Erik and Elisabeth, in a corresponding but a more destiny laden way, designated
it as ‘something one had waited for … the whole life, actually’ and ‘predestined’,
respectively. In short, their experiences could be characterized as peak or extraordi-
nary experiences of consumption, triggered by an encounter with what was retro-
spectively conceived by them as the right kind of collectibles. In Victor’s and Erik’s
cases the experience could also be characterized as aesthetic, since it was a certain kind
of music that turned records into collectibles for them. Elisabeth’s experience seems
to have more of a self-biographical character. But common to all three of them was
that a certain class of object mediated an extraordinary personal experience that also
assigned them a subject position as a collector. In the last instance taking on a
collector identity seems to be the result of an extraordinary encounter between a
human being and a thing where they mutually construe one another as a collector
subject and a collectible object. Hence, a kind of double construction, where the
subject is transformed by the object and vice versa: the subject becomes a collector
and the object a collectible. Collectors’ affective bonds to certain things are of a
special kind since they are both particular and general; tied to a special type of object
as well as a particular object in itself. Bibliophiles are devoted to books, discophiles
to records, and cineastes to films.

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