One of my main motivations for blogging (again) was to force myself to go through all the zillions of photos I have taken over the years and just do *something* with them — either print them, organize them, or put them online. It has taken me a long time to go through years (decades?) of photos on cds, old (now practically extinct) online albums, dusty computer hard drives that have sat dormant for nearly a decade…needless to say, it is still a work in progress.
I stumbled across a set of photographs taken (I think) in the late 90s or maybe 2000 when I was just a little pipsqueak visiting an ex-bf in Chicago. That trip had been all but erased from memory until I found these photos.
These were hastily and poorly scanned straight from the b+w negatives in low resolution around the same time these were taken. No edits have been made.
When I look at other peoples’ photos, I often wonder what compelled them to take that particular photo — to imprint such a specific moment in time forever on film. It’s interesting to see these photos again after being hidden for so long. At that time in my life, my ex and I were in that stage of relationship where we were just about to break up — that period of time when we were still trying to convince ourselves that we could make it work when deep down inside we were afraid to admit that we knew it wouldn’t.
That’s where I was in Chicago over ten years ago: trying to stop something that was already in motion, wishing there was a way to freeze time. By the end of the trip, after a million tear-filled break ups and a million overly dramatic promise-filled make-ups, we realized that we were on different paths in life.
It was one of the last times we ever saw each other.
Camera: Minolta SR-T 101
Film: Kodak T-Max 400 B+W
Scanned from negatives
