shashasha

“On Keeping a Notebook”, the fourth volume in the Gould Collection’s photography-paired-with-literature series, photographs by British artist Jamie Hawkesworth are interspersed with Joan Didion’s 1966 essay “On Keeping a Notebook”.

Hawkesworth’s leisurely, empathetic photographs – taken between 2012 and 2019 around the world, from Japan to Russia and Mongolia to the US and UK – exemplify what Didion writes about notekeeping in her essay. As fragments, sentiments, single thoughts and moods, each of the photos invites the reader into Hawkesworth’s world, purposefully ignoring the line between fact and fiction.

“[O]ur notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’ We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”
— from Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook”