A trip down memory lane

24/01/2022 Nilson Lattari

I was tidying my wardrobe and many photo negatives fell on me. Then, I spent my time observing them. By the way, in this technological age, to be clear, a photo negative is a polished and bright piece that worked like our modern backup before our digital age. If we lost one photo we could recover it to restore memories about people, trips and other things.
The pieces were slippery and we had to keep them intact by envelopes to protect them from scratches, fingerprints, greasy that could change their colours and quality. I make references to this because there are people that take photos in the same way as romantics and artisans.
Curiosities don’t stop now and are we speaking about photos, ok?. Temporal registers are kept in safe, in albums to show them to relatives and lovers when they are visiting their boyfriends and girlfriends for the first time in their homes and they want to know their previous life: ex-lovers, trips and curiosities among smiles and remembrances.
This previous time, that we remember by handling positive photos, is our subject. Manipulating photos is travelling in time. It is not enough to see them, play with them, but we have to observe characters and landscapes. How they were before, and now they are stopped there, frozen smiles in their eternal “make cheese”. Studied poses, chosen scenarios, everybody together to fit in the small space of the machine. The register after the flash: Real-time travel.
I spend my time observing not what is there but what’s beyond. What was that person thinking at that time on photos? Young, what was he or she waiting about the future? On background a chosen urban scene to decorate the photo. People dressing old fashion clothes and walking around, thinking about their life and they don’t imagine that their thoughts, their walking are registered through the time and they were taken to other places and strange people look at them and make comments.
How many of us are registered on visitors’ photos who visited our country and carried out our way of life, our clothes and habits which represent our people and country. We are unknown persons to others and at the same time we are revealing and we are revealed.
Before digital photo age and its copies without mystery, a long time ago, fewer people had access to these technological gadgets. And these registers are important documents for the future and they bring us memories and carry us to the past.
I spend my time observing these photos because I imagine myself walking throughout the streets, chatting with people, and making comparisons between our ages.
I would like to ask them about their way of life, to laugh at their beliefs about the future. I would like to talk to them how they imagine what it would be or what could happen.
At the same time, I would like to tell them many situations that they imagine won’t happen. Maybe, time travel won’t be possible and I hope so. It would be insane to take out their hopes about possible solutions to social problems. And on the other hand, I wouldn’t like someone to tell me about the future because I will get disappointed.
And now, there is a lot of registers on the web about our age, and people in the future will imagine that the past would be better and the Earth a beautiful place to live.
And the world keeps walking with self-confident smiles.