A trip down memory lane

24/01/2022 Nilson Lattari

I was tidying my wardrobe and many negative photos 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 in envelopes to protect them from scratches, fingerprints, and grease that could change their colours and quality. I make references to this because there are people who take photos in the same way as romantics and artisans.
Curiosities don’t stop now, and are we speaking about photos, okay? 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.
Our subject is handling an album of photos. Manipulating photos is travelling in time. It is not enough to see and play with them, but 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, and everyone together to fit into 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? Young, what was he or she waiting for in the future? In the background, a chosen urban scene was used to decorate the photo. People dressing in old-fashioned clothes and walking around, thinking about their lives, and they don’t imagine that their thoughts, their walking, are registered through time, and their images were taken to other places, and strange people looked at them and made 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 the digital photo age and its copies, without mystery, people imagined 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 down those streets, chatting with people, and making comparisons between our ages.
I would like to ask them about their way of life, to smile at their beliefs about the future. I would like to talk to them to know what they thought about the future, and how it would be, or what could happen.
At the same time, I would like to tell them many situations that they imagined but won’t happen. Maybe, time travel won’t be possible, and I hope so. It would be insane to take out their hopes about 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 are 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.