The Becoming Photo

The Becoming Photo.

 

 

Once, in another life - one that meant so much more than I care to admit - I remember walking with her in Calabria. I remember like it was yesterday. Both of us without a care in the world, we met so many peculiar and wonderful people back then – so much more than I do today, it seems, although I’ve stopped wondering why that is anymore.
It was late August when we encountered a brazen and intense looking stranger on the road who said proudly he was from Eastern Europe. He had insisted on taking photographs of us for a book that he was making and that we would never see and that we would never read. We let him take just one of us. We thought we were too special and above such things back then, and I regret that now as there are only these rose-tinted reminiscences of us that remain, and I don’t really trust them anymore. He'd even taken down an address where he'd promised to send it off to – not that we ever got it though, well, at least I never got mine.
I often try to imagine where that photo is now and the things it has seen. He had a fancy silver camera that looked as if it always felt cold to the touch and his deft hands never let it go. Perhaps he had a black and gold one too – but I might have imagined that bit. Still, to this day, I wonder where that photo ended up and I wonder what we have become.

Had the photo’s previous meanings been rejected and stripped away just as all its emotional origins had been too? Is it now sleeping in a dusty second-hand shop waiting to be awoken by the right hand, or the right mind? I wonder if it had simply been folded over and torn up by an ignorant jealous lover who then unceremoniously scattered it in an overflowing ashtray - just content to release its chemical swan song into the already stale air of their stagnant relationship; it had become a weapon in the lovers’ tiff in the guise of an ex that never existed as a cheap way to strike at the partner’s heart. Perhaps it has been magnificently born again and used in some heartfelt collage for a school project on the importance of family values and the benefits of acknowledging the local community – making the people who saw it clap and comment and bringing tears to the eyes of the teacher who’d thought the whole thing up.
So, have we become useful then?
I imagine it being coyishly ripped out of an almost forgotten album and given a new lease of life before obscurity and entropy had set in for good. Who can say? Perhaps it was stuck on a fridge door somewhere reminding the future people of where they came from and the debt they owed and that they would never be able to pay back. Was it turned around backwards on a windshield only to be revealed by passing streetlights – illuminating, just for a brilliant moment, those faces printed there? Are kids using it for target practice pinned to a board somewhere and we have become pierced and unrecognisable with a dart or a knife straight through our minds, straight through our hearts? I wonder if it had been torn in half and two lovers kept their half with the sweetest of inscriptions on the back, dreaming of when they would be able to place them back together - just trying to keep the hypothalamus working before it realises that it’d simply been wasting its time once again. Or was it simply stuck in a glove compartment in a doomed car that had already accepted its fate as it sat in a breaker’s yard somewhere – cut adrift like an astronaut, slowly floating and waiting to die? Had someone become obsessed by it after having found it in a thrift store and then dedicated the rest of their lives to going on an unsuccessful crusade to find the original owners? Will that someone confront me with it one day and care nothing about transporting me back to its beautifully painful meanings by asking questions that will mean nothing to me and everything to them? Have we become sought-after and desired?
It might have gotten mixed up with Vivian Maier’s undeveloped film and will one day be thought of as two of her distant friends and people will speculate as they always do, and once again, strangers will want to know us. Maybe it was the curiosity of employees as it sat on the tyrannical boss’ desk - the subject of many unasked questions and rumours abounded as to who we were; and yet all it was, was a lucky charm that by pure chance had helped him pass his final exams when he was rock-bottom and was nothing else.
Had we then become inspirations?
Or was it kept in an airtight box under some floorboards in the vain misguided hope of longevity by someone wishing on something that no one else wished upon or considered or even cared about? What if it had slipped through this world to another, and deluded men had built a shrine for it, worshipped it, carved out our faces into elaborate sculptures, sacrificed animals to it, and pleasured themselves in front of it in unspeakable rites in caves deep below the earth?
Had we truly become Goddesses?
Perhaps it had been donated to a historical society somewhere under the pretence of being historically relevant in some way. It may even have erroneously been put in a collection of Soviet dissident art from the Cold War era; it might even be in the archives from the annual Moscow Fine Arts Fair for all we know.
Have we become dissidents then?
Had it been hidden away and then forgotten by the previous owner who’d then passed before telling anyone else about it, before remembering to let it go free? Had it been unceremoniously swept away in a flood, or a demolition, never to be seen again and at mercy to the better Gods of a better time? Have we become the memories best forgotten of good old uncle so-and-so and the wine-breathed and far-fetched stories he used to tell everyone at thanksgiving of how he’d killed aunt Lucy’s cat in the tumble dryer some thirty-six years ago - and how we’d helped him do it?
Have we become innocent murderers?
Perhaps someone had locked it in a chest to keep good company with the other secrets buried there - too scared to let it see the light of day - yet too scared of letting it go too, trapping us. Had it become a lie in an artist’s montage? Had it become appropriated and reimagined – resurrected and given new purpose for some pretentious and elaborate retelling named Finding Forgotten Photography or some such - quoting Sontag, Barthes, Stieglitz, Arbus, and being inspired by Tacita Dean or Joachim Schmid so that we’d become quarrelling sisters in a made-up family? Perhaps it had been used in a now-famous advert in Bolivia where everyone there knew the faces in the photo as if they were family and had been accepted into their collective psyche and even been given loving names like Nayra or Carla, or maybe Gabriela.
Had we really become famous?
Who knows? Maybe it had been taken by aliens as a souvenir? Maybe this is what aliens do – collect our memories for the sake of preservation and that is why it always seems that photos just disappear into thin air. Like socks do; but I don’t think the aliens take them though. It could conceivably be part of a lampshade in some home-craft project and our faces now project onto strangers’ bedroom walls comforting them on the darker nights, becoming intwined in their dreams and nightmares alike. Do we now only exist in dreams? Perhaps it had become a bookmark - cradled within the gentle pages of a book, waiting to be freed from the embrace of those pages – awaiting its moment to fall to the floor and become the delightful subject of many questions and many theories. What if it was being used as a fake profile picture as someone catfished and groomed the naïve and gullible ones?
Have we finally become part of a lie?
Maybe it was dog-eared and peeling; stuffed into the wallet of the only survivor of a family recently lost in a fire and our uncanny similarity was the only link left to the dead. Could it be pinned to a corkboard in the wake of a broken family, left unloved, abandoned, and devoid of meaning much like the shattered union it had erroneously become part of? Maybe someone used it for a gift tag, and it inadvertently gave joy for a short while with our faces eventually being ruined by tears of joy. Perhaps it has become just a random image used in textbooks, ownerless, but still useful, I guess. Had someone come across it and then been undecided if to use it as a genuine postcard, or as a practical joke? It might have simply woken up, become conscious and drifted off to other worlds and is now witness to sights we will never see and wonders we could never imagine. What if bank robbers in Albania had mistakenly printed our photo onto masks that were then used for a now infamous robbery known there as: the Heist of the Two Faced?
Have we indeed become criminals?
Maybe a painter found it in a flea market and went on to paint the people in the photograph turning it into a huge, magnificent wall dominating painting that now hung on a wall somewhere meaning something to someone.
Have we finally become significant and valued again?

And then, foolishly, I torture myself when I think, but what if he’d not set the shutter speed correctly or that the film had slipped off its sprockets within the shiny cold body? Or perhaps the black and gold body. Maybe he’d rushed it, loaded it wrong. Such useless torturous thoughts I have left with me these days; but I simply cannot accept that the film hadn’t been properly and carefully inserted. I remember his dark hands, he was a perfectionist; I’d seen strong and secure hands like that before – they didn’t make such mistakes. What if he’d only sent it to her and she often smiles when she comes across it in her new life with her new friends and her new everything? Maybe - when she feels a little lonely - she takes it out, smells it, delicately runs her slim dark fingers across it and then she straightens out the corners and fondly recalls our time together as we walked to the magic land of Sicily all those years ago. Or maybe she just threw it away, unmoved by such pointless sentimentality and that useless dance with regret that such a photo would evoke. Perhaps she keeps it in a draw, close to her, but she never looks at it just to prove to herself that I no longer mean anything.
Whatever may have happened to it, I like to think that it had at least been developed. Nothing could be sadder than believing that it had never lived at all – a butterfly that never made it; the glorious fleeting mayfly snagged before its time; the phoenix denied its rebirth. A story forever untold is surely the saddest story there is.
Unlike the rest of the world, I never saw her again.