Being a Collector: On Owning Objects

"The things we inherit from the past remind us that the men who made them were like us and give us a tangible link with them" - David Pye

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Being a Collector: On Owning Objects

I’ve been doing inventory of my things recently. Not the soul-searching kind, more literal, where you pick something up, turn it over, and ask yourself how it got here and whether you actually need it. The answer, in most cases, is that it arrived by a particular kind of obsession, and no, you don’t need it.

What I discovered in this exercise is something I probably already knew: I am a collector. I have always been one.

Most young men in America collect something at some point , sports cards, Pokémon cards, coins, baseball caps, something. It’s practically a developmental stage. I went through the cards phase. It didn’t take. But there are things I have collected, consistently and with genuine devotion, since I was young. Objects that have followed me through apartments and across years like loyal, slightly expensive companions.

Before I get into what those are, I want to sit with the concept itself. Because being a collector is a strange thing to be, and it deserves more examination.

A collector can pursue almost anything. Watches, wine, records, art, books, cards, cars, vintage tape measures, the field is genuinely unlimited. Some collectors traffic in objects worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others have amassed entire rooms full of things worth almost nothing by any market measure. The cost of the habit is irrelevant to its nature. What defines a collector isn’t what they spend. It’s how they see.

Walter Benjamin understood this. In his 1931 essay Unpacking My Library, he described the collector’s relationship to objects as one that sidesteps utility entirely, that doesn’t ask what a thing does but rather what a thing means. For Benjamin, the collector loves an object as “the scene, the stage, of its fate.” The period it came from, the hands that made it, the people who owned it before you, all of it accumulates into what he called a “magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”

That is a long and beautiful way of saying: collectors don’t want things for what they do. They want them for what they are. For everything that surrounds them, precedes them, makes them what they are. The object is almost secondary to the story the object carries.

I should say something important before going any further. I wish I weren’t this way.

If I could look at a beautifully made Swedish camera from the 1970s and simply admire it, appreciate it the way you might appreciate a sunset, without feeling the pull to own it, to understand every mechanical detail of it, to know who designed it and why it was discontinued, I would have considerably more money and more time. Both of which I could use.

My brother is built differently. He has taste. He recognizes quality, can tell you why something is well made, and genuinely appreciates fine objects. He just doesn’t need them. He can set them down and walk away. I have always envied this about him. He got it from my mother, I think, the clean gene, the capacity for admiration without acquisition.

I, on the other hand, appear to have inherited something else entirely from my father. My father collects photography prints. It’s a great passion, and an instructive one, because it has meant that I grew up surrounded by extraordinary images, learning without knowing I was learning what great photography looks like, what it demands, what separates a print worth keeping from one that is merely competent.

This is a gift. It is also, dangerous. There are far more great prints worth collecting than there are walls to hang them on. My father knows this. He has not let it stop him. I understand completely.

The obsession, it turns out, doesn’t skip generations. It just changes its object.

I’ll be honest, given the means, I’d fall headlong into photography prints and watches without a moment’s hesitation. The groundwork is already laid. But for now, let me tell you what I actually do collect.

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The first object I truly fell for was the pocket knife.

This sounds simple. It isn’t. Most people have no idea that the pocket knife world is a serious, deep, and surprisingly expensive place to spend your time, and I mean that in the best and worst possible sense. I started somewhere around middle school, maybe high school, buying and selling and researching, time that probably should have gone toward homework. It has settled somewhat since then. The deep dives are less frequent. But the knowledge remains, lodged permanently in my head like a particularly useless superpower.

I know more than any reasonable person should about blade steels, the difference between S30V and M390, why CPM-20CV holds an edge the way it does, what you’re actually getting when you pay for hand-finishing on a grind. I know locking mechanisms: liner locks, frame locks, axis locks, button locks, and the obsessive engineering that separates a knife that opens like silk from one that merely opens. I know materials, titanium handles, carbon fiber scales, ceramic ball bearings in pivot systems that cost more than most people’s entire knife drawer.

I don’t own a Grimsmo Brothers knife. But I know that they machine to some of the tightest tolerances physically possible, that their integral button lock folders cost over a thousand dollars, and that their waiting lists stretch well past a year. I know far too much about this world. It’s not useful information. It’s collector information. There’s a difference, and collectors understand it completely, but for the non collector, yes it is slightly useless and borderline worrisome.

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My next collection will raise some eyebrows, and I’ve made peace with that. I own over a hundred films on Blu-ray.

I started before 4K Blu-ray became a thing, which is, in retrospect, a mild tragedy I try not to dwell on. The newer acquisitions go on the shelf in 4K. The older ones stay where they are, because getting rid of them would defeat the entire point. The point being this: I own these films. Not access to them, not a license that expires when a streaming deal does, I own them, physically, in a format that plays when I put it in the player regardless of what any corporation has decided to do with its content library that month.

There is something genuinely clarifying about this. I can watch The Dark Knight whenever I want to. Not when a streamer has it. Not when the algorithm surfaces it. I put the disc in, I sit down, and I watch one of the greatest films ever made without a notification or a recommendation interrupting the experience. It is, as I said, a beautiful thing and I recognize that describing physical media as beautiful puts me in a particular category of person.

I should say I haven’t gone fully down the casing rabbit hole, there is a whole world devoted to low-print special editions, limited releases, boutique labels. I’ve kept a respectful distance. Though I do own Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in a special edition green steel book. That’s neither here nor there.

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One of my newer collections, and the one that will likely outlast everything else, is photo books.

This one I recommend to anyone. You don’t need serious money to find something truly extraordinary, a well-made photo book at a reasonable price is one of the last genuine bargains in the collecting world, and I say that knowing full well the prices are rising as more people figure this out. I’ve watched it happen in real time.

Last year I found my grail. Theaters by Hiroshi Sugimoto, a book I had been hunting for nearly three years. I looked for it in bookstores across several cities, in multiple countries, with a persistence that probably read as strange to the booksellers involved. It had been out of print long enough that copies were scarce, and the ones that surfaced weren’t cheap. When I found it at a good price, I didn’t hesitate for a second.

Sugimoto photographed movie theaters over decades, grand old picture palaces, drive-ins, the ornate and the utilitarian, with an eight-by-ten camera and exposures that lasted the entire length of the film being shown. The screen in each image becomes a pure white rectangle, a column of light in a dark room. The effect is otherworldly. It is photography thinking about itself, about time. It is a book that makes you want to be a better photographer and a more attentive person.

I’ve made two photo books myself. I intend to make many more. There is something about the form that I find appealing, the idea of selecting images, sequencing them, giving a body of work a physical life that someone can hold in their hands. A book doesn’t need a password. It doesn’t require a platform. It just exists, and it waits for you, and when you open it it’s exactly as you left it. In an age of infinite digital images that nobody prints and few people truly look at, a well-made photo book feels like a small act of resistance.

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Last, and never least, are the cameras.

I have too many. I use almost all of them, which I offer not as a defense but as a distinction, these are not display pieces, not status objects, not gear accumulated for its own sake. Every camera in my collection works differently from every other. Different formats, different mechanics, different philosophies about what photography is and how it should be made. They do not overlap. I did not plan this as carefully as it sounds, but I’m glad it worked out that way.

I love photography, looking at it, reading about it, writing about it, and above all making it. Cameras are the greatest tools ever made, and I mean that without irony or sentimentality. They are machines for stopping time. For taking the relentless forward motion of a life being lived and pulling a single moment out of it, fixing it, making it permanent. Every photograph that has ever moved you was made by someone who pointed a camera at something real and pressed a button. The camera is what made that possible.

Life is short and mostly unrepeatable. Cameras help us remember that it happened at all.

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So why do I collect? Not because the objects are beautiful, though they often are. Not because they hold their value, though some do. But because each one is a record of a particular human attempt to make something well, to care about a thing enough to get it right. And in a world that has grown somewhat indifferent to getting things right, that still seems worth paying attention to.

Worth collecting, even.

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If you’re also a collector I advise you to comment. I’m sure we have much to discuss.