A friend sends me a link.
“What’s this?” I say.
“Too Hard to Keep—” she says.
I click it.
“It’s an art exhibit,” she says. “You might like it.”
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I begin scrolling.
“People send the artist pictures they can’t look at anymore,” she says. “He curates them.”
“In the mail?” I say. “They send physical pictures?”
“Yes.”
“No backstory?” I say.
“No.”
The artist is Jason Lazarus.
He explains Too Hard to Keep in his creative manifesto:
The project started in 2010 with the idea that these pictures are the type of photos that, for whatever reason, are too painful to keep,” says Lazarus. “Sometimes literally pictures of things that are hard to look at. There might be a stack of images where it’s not anything specific — any image that is so obviously difficult — but maybe those images were made on a trip with someone or they’re from a period of your life that it feels more productive to purge that stuff rather than look at it or sort of hide it from yourself.”
I keep scrolling.
It’s one picture after another against a white background, much negative space. Some pictures feel wholesome and sweet, happy times. Some are the opposite of these things: they feel disturbing. Some feel profoundly sad. They all feel very personal.
“I guess we fill in the backstory for ourselves,” I say.
Now and then, I look at Too Hard to Keep.
As a copywriter, I find it a potent, haunting way to exercise my imagination: creating a narrative for these anonymous pictures, giving them life.
And it reminds me it’s okay to withhold details, to not tell the whole story, to respect The Reader’s own innate ability to fill in the blanks.
Because our imagination is baked into us, an essential part of us. So using it is a natural and incredibly satisfying thing to do. And the more we use it, the more vivid it gets — and this can only help us create richer, more compelling marketing stories.
Try it, if you like.
Browse Too Hard to Keep and imagine for yourself:
