This essay attempts to reveal how a world of objects can be created through the transformation of objects functioning as gifts, into fetishized objects functioning as a collection. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart presents the criteria under which a collection of objects can replace one's meaning of the outside world as they know it to exist.

There are two movements to the collection's gesture of standing for the world: first, the metonymic displacement of part for whole, item for context; and second, the invention of a classification scheme which will define space and time in such a way that the world is accounted for by the elements of the collection …what must be suppressed here is the privileging of context of origin…¹

To initially establish an object as a gift, I will use the example of an ordinary photographic snapshot—an image exposed onto film and developed in a darkroom. In order to negate the object as gift, I will use the example of a Polaroid image that develops immediately at the moment of exposure.

When the ordinary photographic snapshot is taken, a bond is made between those involved in its exposure. A social connection is therefore established between people because the subjects each give away a piece of themselves in the process of being photographed, leaving their spirit on the film.²

The recorded image represents the social relations between those involved in the production of the image. If an object is defined by how it is exchanged, then a picture taken can be considered a gift from the subject to the photographer. For example, if I take your picture you have therefore given me a gift that contains the memory of our interaction, embedding a piece of you in the image. According to Marcel Mauss, within a reasonable time limit, reciprocity is obligatory because “gifts circulate…with the certainty that they will be reciprocated.”³ Time passes. I may print that picture in the darkroom and make an extra print with the intention of giving it back to you. At this point the piece of you converges with the piece of me (the product of my labor) embedding myself in the gift to be returned.⁴ Reciprocity entails, which continues the circulation of that gift. Through participating in my obligation to you I sustain that relationship as whole and intact and invite future exchanges as well. I may have even made a new friend.

A Polaroid, however, is entirely different: A single Polaroid is the only one like it. It is the authentic gift and you have given it to me. The value of your gift is not a use value but more along the lines of what Lewis Hyde refers to as worth, or “those things we prize and yet say ‘you can't put a price on it.’”⁵ He also shows how “we tend not to assign comparative values to those things to which we are emotionally connected.”⁶ My emotional attachment exists because, in both cases, the gift “is not inactive…it still possesses something of [you].”⁷ This is especially relevant when considering photographic images, which are, quite literally, representations of that thing, recorded on a substrate.

Mauss shows that the circulation of an object not only encompasses an initial receiving, then giving back, but also a further receiving based on that initial giving back.⁸ What happens when that exchange is terminated? Is the object able to continue functioning as a gift? The way in which my Polaroids circulate ends with me. First, by taking a snapshot of you, I am accepting your gift. Since the Polaroid is immediately a tangible thing, I could offer it up to you and complete that exchange, rendering the Polaroid a true gift, establishing new social ties, and becoming part of your community. However, I negate the possibility of any further exchange by refusing to participate in the gift exchange, and keeping the Polaroid for my own collection. Sometimes people get offended and even walk away. There is no chance for communication and I may not even see you again. I have therefore created and destroyed a social bond in only 60 seconds.⁹ Through my intervention of the gift cycle, I inadvertently remove myself from that loop. My refusal to participate “is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality.”¹⁰ I will no longer get the chance to receive your gifts either.

Even though I am providing my own alienation from that possible social world, I am not deemed to be alienated forever. There is still the possibility to re-incorporate myself into a pseudo-world and keep the Polaroid because a collection “can also serve as a metaphor for the social relations of an exchange economy.”¹¹ While I am severing relations, I am simultaneously creating new relations with the objects. The Polaroid collection becomes a substitute—a replication of your image even—for your community and the loss of that social world. In a sense, I add a piece of you to my private collection and begin to build anew. Hyde notes: “gifts constrain us if we…fail to respond with an act or an expression of gratitude.”¹² What drove me to break the cycle in the first place?

A Polaroid is no ordinary object. The labor that goes into producing a traditional photograph is quite clear to me, having earned a degree in photography. But I have no idea how the image appears on a Polaroid in just 60 seconds. The labor is obscured, which makes the Polaroid seem to appear from a mysterious black box; it is magical. In the eyes of the collector, the production “appears to be self-motivated and self-realized.”¹³ Furthermore, if the object is “‘made,’ it is by a process that seems to invent itself for the pleasure of the acquirer…[and] an illusion of a relation between things takes the place of a social relation.”¹⁴ Since no bond is formed, yet I still acquire this thing for my collection, the Polaroid ceases to be a gift and starts to take the shape of a fetish object.

Stewart shows the following criteria for deciding when and how an object becomes part of a collector's world: The function of the collection is the “creation of a new context, a context standing in a metaphorical…relation to the world of everyday life.”¹⁵ However, this can only occur “once the object is completely severed from its origin” because “the point of the collection is forgetting—starting again…within a context that is framed by the selectivity of the collector.”¹⁶ For this reason is it important to see how the collector interacts with the objects because the collection's “existence is dependent upon principles of organization and categorization,” thereby “replac[ing] origin with classification.”¹⁷ For me, collecting includes the endless difficulties of maintaining the collection of Polaroids: I count them, file them, and try to categorize them. Even if the image is blank or black, it still has a place in my pseudo-world. I find them in odd places around my house. I have to build boxes to store them, but never seem to account for future acquisitions. Sometimes I lose them. All these things throw me off and I have to begin again. It is more of a fixation that consumes me, rather than my initial greedy desire to consume them. In its entirety, the collection comes to hold an aesthetic value through my “manipulation and positioning” of the individual Polaroids as a group, thus allowing the objects to be “displaced by the value of relations and sheer quantity…promis[ing] the amassing of a cyclical world that could replace the world itself.”¹⁸