Once upon a time I was 19 years old. I was proudly carrying a Minolta X-300, the first slr that I ever bought, loaded with black&white film and I was roaming around the city to capture the 36 pictures that the roll of film was allowing me to shoot.
That was many, many years ago and when I found a forgotten box with printed photographs from that era, I shivered from mixed emotions. The apparent nostalgia for my years of youth but also an intense curiosity about the kind of pictures, my young self used to take.
The content of that box took me by surprise!
Obviously I didn't remember what pictures I had taken so many years ago. If I have found them mixed with the work of other photographers there was no way that I could tell them apart. But that was my box, no doubt about it and so was the content. I took those shots, I developed the film at home and I printed them with a Krokus enlarger at my kitchen which I used to transform into a darkroom.
That's as far as I can remember but what kind of pictures were waiting for me in the box and most importantly, how much different would they be if I had taken them as my current version of self?
To my surprise the main difference was the vast upgrade in my equipment after all those years. Some minor technical flaws were more than obvious. Over or underexposed shots, out of focus or a bit blurry ones are things that could still happen to me if I tried to shoot with that camera and film. But I can still recognise my photographic "style" or "eye" or whatever you might call the set of characteristics that distinguishes one photographer from another.
And that was something I wasn't expecting!
I kept staring at the pictures wondering what that might mean. Remember that I was 19 years old when I took them and I am over 50 by now.
The good version is that I had established a photographic style from a very young age and I stayed loyal to it, as the decades were passing by.
The bad version is that I haven't really evolved as a photographer and apart from the technical upgrade, I have remained stagnant to what I already knew.
The first version is flattering while the second one is a bit sad.
Which one is the truth though?
Before I end this post I wanted to include a few more pictures that I took today, showing the actual box and the printed photographs that I have found. As I was scanning them and cleaning the files from dust spots and scratches I was thinking that they are already different. What you just saw on your screen only resembles to the printed pieces of paper that I held on my hands. But that was the only way to share them across the globe.
Pros and cons,
I guess.
This is my entry for the #monomad challenge
All the pictures and the words are mine.
Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.
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