"I will show you who you are, not in words but in beautiful images that could not ever be counterfeited or forged. And you will know exactly who you are, forever by knowing what it is that you love."
Mark Helprin.
Inside this box is a is a gift... a keepsake... a photo collection... an art work. It is also a kind of journal. A backdoor way to make a journal is to have a friend make it for you.This method requires some luck, and luckily, my friend David is a photographer who also creates one off art pieces that he often gives as gifts.
I first met David in a dark room. This particular darkroom was a photographic dark room in the architecture school on the Berkeley campus. He came into the lab to develop his photos. I worked at the desk helping keep the photo lab running. We were both students. We struck up a conversation. I had no idea that this particular conversation would be decades long.
David has always been a photographer and always traveled with a camera, long before cameras were attached to a phone. I could spot his tall blond figure across the campus by his big, bulky Nikon slung over his shoulder. His Nikon would come along on walks, sailing, or on on a trip to the beach. We went places. David took pictures. Or in his words, "you don't take a picture, you make a picture." At the time I didn't realize he was documenting my life,
One birthday, decades after college, I was presented with a box that promised to show me who I was. That is precisely what this lovely gift did. I opened the box to find a collection of photos end to end that was long enough to span the room. It is a wonderful document of my life. No words. Only pictures. Many photos compiled accordion style in one very long unfolding of my life in beautiful images.
It was a treasure.
It still is.
November 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment