Dear J-
I keep all of our old photographs in a big cardboard box. Okay, it’s probably not that big (maybe twenty pounds worth, including the old not-so-sticky envelopes) as we don’t have that much depth to the photo archive, but I try to keep it all in one place. If I can, which is not always easy (good intentions and all; I run across old packets and mean to file them away with the others — and extract the negatives from the ones I haven’t already done, as I try to keep those somewhat safe in a binder (the binder is now full to overflowing; perhaps I can find a new one soon).
This leads to deep confusion about subjects and times. Years get crossed, and I have no way of figuring out what negatives go with what year until I sit down and kill an afternoon doing just this, and even then it’s not simple, as the dates I scrawl on the envelope are simply when the film got dropped off for development. In my heyday that would have been accurate to within a week. Towards the end of the 90s? That stuff would linger in cameras for years. I still have some rolls tied up in cameras, in fact, and no idea when or if I’ll ever finish them off. There is a romance to film, but there’s also a certain pain factor that means digital is easier: instantaneous is easier, and having more sharing options is usually easier too.
This is sort of a histogram: moving right in the picture goes back a year per stack — and 1996 (the big stack at the end) is actually split into two stacks. It occurs to me that the photographs trace my loneliness: I bought my first camera bare months before (April 1995) theVet and I started dating — July — and there’s a few rolls inside 1995 as I ran around taking shots of interesting things, later morphing into the desperation of 1996 (after leaving California in August the number of rolls exploded) and 1997 (four rolls from theVet’s graduation alone). And by 1998? Well, you don’t see it here but ’98 was when I bought a five-pack of Velvia and Kodalux mailers. That was my therapy that year: spend a Sunday in the Arboretum chasing the light from morning to dusk, thirty-six undeveloped pictures in the mail by Monday. Funny how I can believe I connect best with people through the eye of a lens. If I overstep it’s not because I want people to think hey, that’s funny. I want to know if you remember the same things I do. And that awful weight of 1996-98 is hard to bear alone.
Mike