Amateur Collecting and Curating with K-pop Photocards
By: Avery Calvert
Every time I get a new K-pop album my heart starts to race with excitement. Since 2018, I have been a fan of Korean pop music or K-pop. When you buy a K-pop album, you are not just buying a CD, but also stickers, a poster, a photobook, and most importantly, a photo card. These photo cards are the same size as baseball cards and they largely serve the purpose. K-pop fans, like myself, love to collect certain cards of our favorite members; however, considering my background in public history, I tend to curate my collection differently than other fans. In this blog, I will take you through my steps of collecting and curating.
The main difference between collecting and curating is that collecting is the process of increasing the size of your collection. At this step in the process, you are not concerned with the message of the collection but simply gathering objects. Curating is the process of arranging these objects to convey a message.
With my collection of K-pop cards, I first acquire the cards through purchasing albums and buying them from sellers online. After I receive these cards, I place them in a binder and label them with the name of the person photographed, album, date I bought the card, and where I bought the card. After I have written down all this information, I preserve the cards in sleeves to protect the cards. I then place the cards in binder pocket protectors. These pocket protectors fit nine cards per sheet. After all this collecting and processing is done, I start the curation process.
When curating, it is important to have a message. For my photo card collection, the message is fairly simple: my favorite artists. I curated this message by placing all of my favorite photo cards in a smaller, cuter binder and displaying my absolute favorite cards around my apartment; however, depending on what you are curating you may want to find different display methods.
Overall, collecting and curating can be done on any collection, even amateur collections! The most important part of amateur collecting is to have fun!
