Memories. A recollection of what we know, of what we experienced. The memories will be re-enforced by photographs, and both the photographs and our memory will get coloured over time. So why not start with that immediately?
Below is a collection of what is quickly becoming a memory, or perhaps a collection of how I want to remember that summer.
Of course it is fake. Like all memories, manipulation happens, and none so strong as here in these pictures. All these photographs have been taken with a digital camera, and the colour processing happened digitally. Nothing was ever printed on paper, so no changes in colour happened over time, or grain showed up due to the use of film. Light leaks? I know what they look like. My 1980s Praktica had a beautiful streak coming in on the top-right corner of every photograph. I know what they look like, and they were never added on purpose.
A faded fake border? Since I never printed them, adding a border is obviously fake, but I love the border. I love the style, and I love the impression that something went not as perfect as I perhaps wanted somewhere along in the process. And isn’t that what a memory is? An idealisation of something that was never perfect, and it never was the way we remember it, whether it is the event or the colour.
But that doesn’t matter. With time, both memory and colour change and fade. They turn the event into something different, which we still love and look back on with that strange tingle in our soul.
It is a desire to hold on to something that was, we thought that was, or perhaps we think how we would like it to have been back then. When things were better, even though they never were, but due to some mysterious process in our brain we think they were.
Here is to memories, and to creating them today. Idealised, rose-coloured, fading like an evening shadow, and less real than it actually was.
Memories of summer — Black and white
Memories of summer — faded Polaroid
