So I spent yesterday and this morning sorting though 80 billion photos. I’ve been a prolific (if not great) photographer for pretty much all of my life, and until today still had nearly all the photos I’d ever taken past my teens.
As in stacks of them.
As in boxes full of photographs I’d never got out.
I’d looked at them when I took them, sure, and I’d put some of them in albums. But the very-similar-to-another, the blurred (lots), the out-of-focus (many, particularly as I got used to my AE-1), the landscape shots of the lake-district year after year after year. The school photos that make me remember how much I hated school? They sat in their little ‘Kwik Photo’ or ‘Bonusprint’ envelopes with negatives and haven’t seen the light of day for years.
My first round of university, which shows off a past I generally don’t share, where alcohol fuelled my ability to cope with self loathing. The round of photos I took of myself a year before I came out, disheveled and at 5am, trying to come to terms with my self and by body. All of them have sat in a ‘Fun Size Mars’ box (marked ‘best before 1984’).
Today I ripped the few I want to keep from the pages of the albums, I took my past and I said no-fucking-more will this hang over me.
I took the photos of my school time and took a few photos of the few people who were decent and nice, the few flashes of moments where the bullying stopped, where I wasn’t any longer sent to Coventry, where I started to actually make friends and they are now stuck, higgledy piggledy in an album.
I still have the negatives, for all those random shots of University – the first time in my life I had friends who really stuck by me, and coped with all my random depressive shite as I worked myself out into a person rather than a selection of fragments fronted by a mask. I still have those negatives from childhood, and I shall spend some time today sorting them into the photo album that happens to have negative holders in it.
I still have the letters my sister sent me when she was going by the name Milly and started letters ‘Vienna Cheesecake’ for reasons that now escape me.
But the boxes of photos are now less than a box. The albums are pruned. And I can look at them and feel nostalgia rather than thinking ‘god, I hated school’. I still can’t quite look myself in the eye at University, I can see the pain, I can see the waiting and trying to work out how to be me. But my friends helped me become whole, and for that I am endlessly grateful.
