The turn to privacy can be seen in the re-embace of home cooking, the organic,  and slow food as a reaction to an industrial  food system degraded by pollutants and chemicals and corporate neglect. Many  are looking to domesticity in search of a simpler, more sustainable, more meaningful way of life because the government regulators cannot be trusted.  

Another return to privacy is  taking snapshots  for oneself on daily walks --such as the  Adelaide-Himeji Garden in Adelaide's south parklands. It is an activity that we perform  for our own satisfaction and pleasure whilst ignoring  the work of self-perfection that contemporary capitalism expects of us in public life. 

The Himeji Garden, which  was a gift from Adelaide's sister city, Himeji in 1982,  celebrates Adelaide's sister-city relationship with the ancient Japanese city of Himeji.  The enclosure, which  is one of only a few classical Japanese Gardens in Adelaide,  blends two classic Japanese styles, the lake and mountain garden and the dry garden. It is unimpressive. 

Contemporary photography, likewise,  blends  or remixes  the analogue and digital styles  within a visual  art tradition.   Many, for instance, see  photography as an abstraction through a lens. It has  its roots in the stable and fixed vision of the camera obscura and  positivism  and  belongs to the tradition of realism. 

Photography also  participated in  the “modernist rupture” in painting that began to modernize vision at the end of the 19th century and is central to  the contemporary cult of individuality on Instagram that normalises a perception of our selves as commodities perpetually on sale.  

The overload of digital images now floating in cyberspace   indicates that  if the turn to privacy was a form of rebellion or a way of survival for  an ethical life, it is  also deformed by the productive relations  and social rationalization. So the practices that make up ethical life in our private existence, and our subjective experiences,  cannot be trusted  to provide an adequate guidance on what constitutes  ethical life. 

What we have are fragments,  aphorisms, memories, relationships and cliches.