Photo Books

This is a tribute to the little photo shoots my friend and I would do.  I write about this because its probably one of the coolest photo albums I have and it was done not quickly, but easily and cheaply. Sometimes God really is in the details, and sometimes the obsession over details can ruin a good thing.  Nobody went to the craft store and bought scrapbooking papers or used paper die cuts or stuck little (- what I call -) ooby-doos -on the pages. All we bought was film and some photo corners.

It started out in highschool, where we could print our photos in the highschool darkroom, and then when we were away at separate colleges everytime we saw each other we would do another photo shoot. We started a little book for our photos - My friend Jen bought it off the sale rack at the now caput Borders Books. It was just random portraiture. But you can tell where large gaps were and when I look back at the photos its nice to remember exactly what we were doing and where we were in our lives that day. Just the fact that that we used to do things like this is nice to remember. The last photo is of her trying on the bridesmaid dress with the flowers for my wedding. That seems like forever ago now, and while we've seen each other since then, I guess nobody took any pictures. Sad huh. There's about two more pages left and it would be nice to finish it up with one final good strong photo shoot. I don't know what it is about photos that's so haunting, I mean I guess I do. They capture time, and that's something nobody can do. Ghosts from the past. Stasis where everything else is in constant flux.

Joan Didion said something about this in her book  "The Year of Magical Thinking" Her husband dies suddenly and in the last pages of she comments that she never expected it to end; she was like most of us, just going on the unconscious premise that her life situations and the people she loves are going to last forever. I've had some taste of this strange phenomena in my life- When I had just visited my uncle in the nursing home a week before my mother told me he had passed away, I thought the same thing 'I never thought that would be the last time I saw him. I didn't think he would die so soon.' And on the less tragic side - when your jedi master acupuncturist in New York tells you she's moving to Vermont, or when your favorite chiropractor just up and vanishes. Nothing last forever. Except photo books. Here's some out-takes.

Happy photo-snapping!