Will you marry me? (no, not me)

In case you have not read a paper called "New York Times" today, there is an interesting article in it on men who hire professional photographers to have them secretly take pictures of their marriage proposal. While I assume that this does not necessarily fall under the rubric "tourism," I thought of our brief discussion on photography last week - as well as of other discussions on archives and also authenticity. We need pictures of every moment because we fear that we (or history) will forget it otherwise, and we want to present our life story to others. We are continuously writing/illustrating our autobiographies:

“The trend is on the rise to have all the moments documented in your life,” said Anna Post, the author of “Emily Post’s Wedding Parties,” to be published next month by Collins. “You see it on MySpace and Facebook, where people have posted 200 photographs of themselves, and they’re not even photographs of profound moments.”

[...]

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University who studies the impact of new media on human interaction, said: “I watch students come to the realization that there’s an internal contradiction in their lives. They both want to be famous and they want to be authentic, and yet there’s something in their striving to archive their lives that’s inauthentic.”

One of his former students recently posted his own proposal photographs on Facebook, he noted. That site and others like MySpace “allow them to be their own publicists,” he went on. “Which ties in with the marriage thing. It really is a fascinating phenomenon. It’s almost like if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/fashion/20proposal.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th