Hot sunny Chicago summer. Barbecue in the tiny backyard of my friends David and Maria’s apartment. My friend Ted and I – color coordinated, we did not plan it – together: it was shortly before he moved back to New York. I still see him, on average, once every couple of months. Lifelong friends. The other person we called “Hubbell”, after The Way We Were, and his boyfriend was Tigh and … I guess I should drop a link to this post – which I wrote a long long time ago – to explain Tigh and Hubbell. Tigh just sent this to me, and … I’d never seen it before (although I have my own pictures from that party). What’s wild is … I just realized I don’t think I have any pictures of Ted and me together. And now I do! We were only a couple of years into our friendship here.
See, I come from the generation where you have a limited amount of pictures of any given moment, and of course you weren’t sharing pictures online, where you get to see your friend’s pictures of the same event. You know your own photo album. And so to see pics from other people’s analog photo albums of the same event is wild and very welcome.
As I’ve been taking up photography quite seriously recently, I’ve been reflecting on where my love of taking photos comes from, because my family did NOT have photo albums. There are very few extant photos around from my childhood, and in honesty, I’m not sure how many will turn up when we eventually really start digging through my parents’ things. We had a Kodak Instamatic but when my parents took pictures they had slides made, not photo prints. It wasn’t until I went to college and saw all my friends with their pictures and their cameras that I decided I wanted one…and now here I am, subscribing to photographers on YouTube and studying the Exposure Triangle and planning where I want to go on the weekends on the basis of what I might want to shoot.
I do wish I had more photographs of memories like this, though. (And as ever, thumbs-up to the overalls!)
Oh God the SLIDE era. Half of my childhood is trapped in slide form!
You have such a good eye – I love your photos!
and overalls, yes! I wore those until they literally fell apart. I should have been like you and had many pairs in reserve!