From Final Portfolio for 100F: "Pop Dystopia" - Proofs

 Proofs

I’ve seen the photographs. My whole life on a contact sheet, magnifying loupe at the ready. Grease pencil at hand. And it will be beautiful. I’ve decided that. I’ve started curating them into books. The kind with the glossy pages and canvas covers. Maybe some embossing too if it fits into the budget. You’ll have to let me know what you think. I’m confident in the aesthetic value of the photos but I want them to mean something to the viewer. And right now, I only know what they mean to me. 

The first book will be shot on a digi-cam with all the delightful blurs and bright colors that that entails. One day, I will realize that the world is changing and that I will too. I’ll learn how to forget and how to stop feeling, but in the meantime there will be craft papers in iridescent purples and soft sky blues and everything will be dotted with pastel sticky gems. My very existence will be a collage of fractured rememberings. 

The second book will start with my first step onto the yellow school bus: and it’ll be all sepia tinted with pops of red. Like an afterschool special with a low budget, it’ll be bittersweet. It will capture loneliness exactly as it feels. But we’ll save some of the emptiness for later. It’ll be important. You’ll see. The classrooms are four walls of chalkboards, blurred without the proper lenses to see them with. Everyone will have the same shoes, except for you, and you should feel very bad about it: these feelings will help the photographs work the way they’re supposed to. The girl I’ll have known since the digi-cam-days, Yoli, will hold my hand and drag me with her. It’ll be a long-exposure, so you only see the blur and the autumn trees that line the path. Somewhere along the way I’ll find my heart broken in pieces, but surely it’s not because she will have kissed someone that wasn’t me. The photos after this are more exposed. 

After that it gets a little grainy. It will be shot on 35mm black-and-white film. Some people will wonder if it’s pointillism, but that’s only how it feels. Most of the photos will be of telephone poles and sidewalks with the kind of crisp lines you only get during gray days. Maybe a shot or two of the backs of a pair of beat-up shoes. No faces. I won’t be looking at those during this time. There are some gold stars though, to brighten up the pages. A few markings in red pen too for reassurance. I will suggest a song to play with the photos at the start of the book; something sad but not hopeless. Not yet. 

There’s a series of double exposures I’m quite excited for. Sort of a watercolor vibe. Each one of a friend dancing: the movement captured in the semi-transparent layers of before-and-after. They’ll look good lined up together. Staring off, wide eyed and hopeful in our party dresses and beloved cartoon adorned t-shirts. In between the photographs are all of the traded letters, the paper airplanes, the scraps of paper with doodled cats. The four of us will start a band together. Scream into the sky on the tops of parking garages. Get high and brush each other's faces with feathers. There will be hard times. There will be loss. There will be one-hundred endings, and then a couple more. But even in the hard times they will stay kind. It’s surprising when things are simply good. 

Then there’ll be some color film. The kind that really brings out the blues in everything and makes the reds look sort of gothic. I’ll be almost out of high school then and bittersweet about it. Clara will let me lean close to her to read her notes, and she’ll lean close too. The feet of our crossed legs hooked together. The photos are of the feet and the close shoulders. Her afro-puffs and my choppy blonde hair backlit and glowing. Nothing will ever come of it, but that’s what the photographs are for. For the remembering. 

After that will come the worst of it, but I’m afraid I can’t do anything about that. In all fairness I will still be learning how to shoot film. I’d really had only gotten lucky before. Shot a few rolls of film and thought myself a proper photographer. But that was all just arrogance. The negatives came out almost completely dark, and I haven’t a clue what happened. There’s only vague shadows of light to imply what will happen. But there’s a beauty to it too, so I’m compelled to keep them in the line-up. Like staring into the void: that dizzy feeling you get when you’re just about to fall in. The way the shadows kiss your cheek then force you down. It’s addictive. You really should try it sometime, and then never again.

The polaroids will come next, and that’s where the paths diverge. I have one line-up of photos but it’s not quite right: they’re all of empty rooms. The bathroom in the basement of the lecture hall where my friends and I will try out the shower and graffiti on the walls. The classroom where we will hide from the security guards so we can hang out “just-a-little-longer.” The dorm room where I will lose my virginity and then lose my sense of self. The exposure will go on just too long and blur out all the faces and bodies into nothing. So I’ve decided to reshoot some of them. I’m thinking, there could be a shot of some of us playing backgammon by the river. Maybe there will be a few of those sticky gems stuck on the photos. A few shots of some beat up shoes, one of a cell phone tower plastered with posters. Someone and I leaned together in silence. Later still, maybe there could be birthday cakes dotted with strawberries, an apartment with a spare set of keys waiting, the warm glow of childhood emitted from our hardened hearts somehow captured by the lens. I think those might be better for the book, don’t you? I’ve given up on cohesion. All of the books will look pretty different but at least we know they’re all a part of the same story, right? Mark them up with this pen, will you? And I’ll get started on the final layout in the morning.