What I Keep

I keep a lot of photographs. Not my own—images I find online and save without thinking too hard about why. The impulse has always been there, but the internet made it compulsive. You can spend hours scrolling through photographs by people you’ll never meet, of moments that have nothing to do with you, and they stick with you anyway.

A photograph by Carl Heindl. Kate Moss on a bicycle. Texture, light, a composition that just works. You save these without thinking about it, and months later you realize they’ve accumulated into something—a personal collection of images that mean something even if you can’t explain what.

What’s strange is that there’s no audience for it. You’re not curating for anyone but yourself. You’re just marking moments that moved you visually on a particular day, in a particular mood. Looking back through saved images is like reading old journals, except in photographs instead of words. You can see your taste shifting, or taste you didn’t even know you had starting to take shape.

This corner of the internet used to be full of people doing exactly this—spending days organizing images, building elaborate personal collections, curation as a real practice. Some of it still happens, but the platforms changed and a lot of it got flattened into algorithms. I miss that version sometimes.