The Lucky Ones
At 17 time stops. You have forever briefly in your grasp. You remember, don’t you? Anything was possible and nothing mattered. The future is a beautiful dream, never approaching.
Trouble has no meaning and boundaries are meant to be pushed. To learn when to stop, you have to go too far. And you are a lucky one if you don’t write your future on an unfortunate incident.
This time in my life has been deeply etched in my memory and I can’t let it go. It haunts me. And I think I somehow always knew it would. The photographs are visual journals, I kept a meticulous record of this time. It was the only way to cope with the change I knew was coming.
These photographs are the last of time before the internet became a place. We wandered aimless as kids. Our flip phones, always dying and being charged on the go, gave us a way to connect - “where u at?” and that was it. Life was outside the phone.
Now phones are an extension of ourselves. When the phone and the camera fused with smartphones photographs stopped being memories and started becoming content. Our photos weren’t personal documents anymore, they were public.
When the camera turns on people now there is a new awareness - where will that photo go? Who will see it? And what will they think of me?
I see a freedom in these images that is of that age, yes, but that is also of the time. We were living on the cusp of change, the very last of a free world.
