![]() People just didn’t take as many pictures in an analog world. My ambivalence about photography wasn’t the only reason for the gaps. They connected me to a part of my past-and a version of myself-that has begun to feel very distant. Each one that I could save now seemed precious and meaningful, even those that weren’t technically “good” photographs. I found a handful of pictures from those years in the basement, all taken by other people. I owned cameras intermittently through my teens and early twenties, but for most of that time I believed that it was better to “be in the moment” than to look at the world through a lens-a fear of alienation that left most of my student life mercifully undocumented. I think I had the idea that photographs were documentation, that I had to take them for a scientific or historical purpose. The grainy prints of archaeological remains and tourist sites were frustrating and dull, bearing no trace of my family’s experiences in those places. For some reason I refused to take pictures of people. I had taken the earliest when I was eight or nine, using a 1950s Brownie box camera that belonged to my mother when she was a girl. It was strange and sad, sifting through these fragments of my pre-digital life. I spent days trying to rescue as many as I could, peeling old prints apart and laying them out to dry. Water destroyed boxes of books and manuscripts, sitting several inches deep in a plastic crate full of photographs. After New York City experienced record rainfall this summer, my basement flooded. ![]()
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
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