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March 29, 2004

Nostalgia Out of Control

Last week in photo lab I worked on some old negatives I found while decluttering. You can see three of the resulting images on viewfinder.

I did a lot of photography in high school and stopped abruptly in my second year of college. Maybe more of my overprotective need to let my brother be the photographer in the family (as if only one of us could love something at a time). So it was like a little time capsule when I opened a notebook and found page after page of negatives from various trips and moments spent with friends. A lot of them I just threw away -- pages of photos of track meets and cross-country races. Not only were most of the photos bad, but even the good ones didn't matter to me any more. I haven't seen or heard from any of those people in ages.

What was kind of interesting were the photos that popped up every now and then: these beautiful encapsulations of how I was feeling at a given moment. I put three of them up so I could explain them.

First, we have Dream of Wheat.

In 1989, I went on an exchange program to France. I didn't know it then, but that was the beginning of the loneliest year of my life. I was basically despised by the youngest daughter of the family I stayed with (the 15-year-old who was having unprotected sex with her 22-year-old boyfriend in Paris), so I spent a lot of time walking the family dog, Djack, along the paths through the wheat fields outside of town. Someday, Rosie will be as good for walks as Djack was.

Then there's Iguacu.

In the summer of 1990, my mother took me with her on a month-long trip through Brazil. It was really amazing. Brazil is a huge country, and we visited five cities that managed to be entirely different from one another. Iguacu was our first stop. It's cold there in the winter, and the cheap motel we stayed at had little concept of central heating. I recommend going upscale for hotel accomodations in Brazil.

I took this picture of my friend Teresa and the German exchange student who was staying with her family while I was back in Ithaca on winter break in 1990. (A bummer of a year to be an exchange student leaving Germany for the US, but oh, well.) I didn't realize it at the time, but my friendship with Teresa was slowly fading away. The proximity thing, I think. It just began to seem like we didn't have much to talk about when we saw each other. Last I heard she was running a farm of some sort with her partner, who was in my class in high school.

I have a few more photos from that set of negatives that I want to develop. Some tourist shots from around France, and a few from Brazil (but fewer; most of the Brazil photos I did in colour). It's interesting to see that I was getting quite good negatives out of the old Fuji camera; just as good as the ones I've been getting from the much more expensive and complicated Nikon. It just goes to show you that equipment cannot replace skill.

Posted by ayse on 03/29/04 at 10:33 PM