Looking at a photo...
Mom is going through a box full of old photos that were never put in albums. It takes time, because obviously when you do something like that, you have to look at everything, and take a moment to remember…
There are many school photos, too. Even preschool photos. My youngest sister, Hanna, she was incredibly cute as a little kid. I seriously believe that she could have been a child model or something (theoretically; she never had the opportunity, and I somehow doubt our parents would have wanted it anyway) but of course, she also had her bad temper that probably would have made her a real pain to work with, ha ha. There’s one photo of her when she was two or three years old, and you can tell from the picture that she had been crying shortly before it was taken. She had been kicking and screaming simply because she did not want to have her picture taken that day… But on most other photos, she looks like the world’s sweetest, cutest kid (except when she was 14 and 15, when she was grumpy all the time). She’s still really beautiful, although I’ve thought lately that she’s way too skinny…
Most of these photos were taken by my dad - photography was one of his hobbies. He even had a darkroom in the house we lived in when I grew up. He didn’t have any place to do that kind of thing in the apartment we moved to when I was fifteen, and later, when we moved to a house again (the house where Hanna and her family now live), he never set up a darkroom. He began using digital cameras around then, though, and he liked playing around with photoshop… although I don’t think he ever got around to do anything really fun with it, like the things Hanna can do.
A few of the photos are mine, too. Mom just gave me a huge pile of photos from my first trip to France (with my grandmother) when I was 14 year old. A few of them are pretty decent, but most are not. *lol*
There are also a few photos from my time in Uppsala where I studied. Right now I’m looking at a picture of my classmate from December 2001. (I know it was in December, because there is a poinsettia at the table.) It’s taken at the Department of Literature, which was at that time located in a 16th century castle. (Back then, the different departments were spread out all over the city, often in historical buildings, but now they’re put together into a few larger, more traditional campuses. I wrote my master thesis in the new “centre for the humanities”, and I never liked the place because it was just gray and dull and ugly.)
The photo is, like most of my photos, not any good because the motive (this girl) is in the middle of the picture alright, but most of the space is taken up by the wall behind her. The wall is ugly and it was probably painted in the 1980’s. It’s white, with splashes of pink and blue colour. (So, once you were inside, you couldn’t have guessed you were in an old castle, but there were odd pieces of old things in there, too, and the place just had it’s own personality, unlike the new place!)
Once you get over these crazy walls, though, and start noticing the girl sitting at a round, white table, you’ll see that she’s really pretty. Her hair is reddish blonde, she has dark eyelashes, and what you can’t see on this crappy photo is that she has the most incredible blue eyes ever. She smiles, and she has a sandwich in plastic wrapping and a juice box in front of her. (In the picture you can even see my hideous yellowish scarf [why?!], my baby-blue umbrella and my backpack…)
I always felt she was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen, and she was also an aspiring writer (I read some of her poems; I still remember some lines) and also a brilliant student. We used to talk mostly about books, but also about writing, before the class started. We got along well (we also met again, a couple years later, when we studied philosophy, and then we also took the same summer class, and then we met again when both of us were writing our master thesis, although her major was aesthetics at the time) but we were never close friends. I always sort of wished I could get to know her better but it just didn’t happen; I think I was too shy while she liked me well enough to hang out with me between classes, but I just wasn’t interesting enough between friends, boyfriends and whatever things she had going on in her life.
She was only 20 years old at the time for that photo, one year younger than me, but she told me once that she was already married. She tended to keep it a secret, though, because the marriage had been a spur of the moment thing one year earlier, and she and the boy weren’t in love with each other anymore, but they just hadn’t bothered signing the divorce papers yet. I listened to this story with a mix of fascination and disbelief; falling in and out of love that quickly, going as far as getting married just for the fun of it, and then going back to being just friends… it almost sounded like something out of a novel to me.
That day when I took that picture of her, I came directly from the store where I had bought the camera; on the table you can see the box the roll of film had been in. So, she was my new camera’s first motive, although I took more photos of another girl, the girl I was in love with. (We lived in the same dorm.) That girl is also there in the little pile of photos in front of me, but I have better photos in an album. This is not as creepy as it sounds, I photographed everybody and she just happened to be around a lot… I mean, I wanted to be able to remember her forever but I wasn’t stalking her with the camera or anything! Well, the girl I was in love with was obviously the most wonderful person ever, in my eyes, but in a way I think my classmate was actually prettier.
It’s strange to remember how much I always was in awe of her, because she was so intelligent, talented, exquisitely pretty and blue-eyed, sweet and kind and also bold, brave, outgoing and seemingly unafraid of everything… but it wasn’t like I had a crush on her, despite all that, despite wanting to be closer to her. I think I mostly just wanted to be like her.
We’re Facebook “friends” now. I don’t know what she’s doing for a living, but she’s doing it in France, married to a Frenchman, and they have a one-year-old daughter.
There are many school photos, too. Even preschool photos. My youngest sister, Hanna, she was incredibly cute as a little kid. I seriously believe that she could have been a child model or something (theoretically; she never had the opportunity, and I somehow doubt our parents would have wanted it anyway) but of course, she also had her bad temper that probably would have made her a real pain to work with, ha ha. There’s one photo of her when she was two or three years old, and you can tell from the picture that she had been crying shortly before it was taken. She had been kicking and screaming simply because she did not want to have her picture taken that day… But on most other photos, she looks like the world’s sweetest, cutest kid (except when she was 14 and 15, when she was grumpy all the time). She’s still really beautiful, although I’ve thought lately that she’s way too skinny…
Most of these photos were taken by my dad - photography was one of his hobbies. He even had a darkroom in the house we lived in when I grew up. He didn’t have any place to do that kind of thing in the apartment we moved to when I was fifteen, and later, when we moved to a house again (the house where Hanna and her family now live), he never set up a darkroom. He began using digital cameras around then, though, and he liked playing around with photoshop… although I don’t think he ever got around to do anything really fun with it, like the things Hanna can do.
A few of the photos are mine, too. Mom just gave me a huge pile of photos from my first trip to France (with my grandmother) when I was 14 year old. A few of them are pretty decent, but most are not. *lol*
There are also a few photos from my time in Uppsala where I studied. Right now I’m looking at a picture of my classmate from December 2001. (I know it was in December, because there is a poinsettia at the table.) It’s taken at the Department of Literature, which was at that time located in a 16th century castle. (Back then, the different departments were spread out all over the city, often in historical buildings, but now they’re put together into a few larger, more traditional campuses. I wrote my master thesis in the new “centre for the humanities”, and I never liked the place because it was just gray and dull and ugly.)
The photo is, like most of my photos, not any good because the motive (this girl) is in the middle of the picture alright, but most of the space is taken up by the wall behind her. The wall is ugly and it was probably painted in the 1980’s. It’s white, with splashes of pink and blue colour. (So, once you were inside, you couldn’t have guessed you were in an old castle, but there were odd pieces of old things in there, too, and the place just had it’s own personality, unlike the new place!)
Once you get over these crazy walls, though, and start noticing the girl sitting at a round, white table, you’ll see that she’s really pretty. Her hair is reddish blonde, she has dark eyelashes, and what you can’t see on this crappy photo is that she has the most incredible blue eyes ever. She smiles, and she has a sandwich in plastic wrapping and a juice box in front of her. (In the picture you can even see my hideous yellowish scarf [why?!], my baby-blue umbrella and my backpack…)
I always felt she was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen, and she was also an aspiring writer (I read some of her poems; I still remember some lines) and also a brilliant student. We used to talk mostly about books, but also about writing, before the class started. We got along well (we also met again, a couple years later, when we studied philosophy, and then we also took the same summer class, and then we met again when both of us were writing our master thesis, although her major was aesthetics at the time) but we were never close friends. I always sort of wished I could get to know her better but it just didn’t happen; I think I was too shy while she liked me well enough to hang out with me between classes, but I just wasn’t interesting enough between friends, boyfriends and whatever things she had going on in her life.
She was only 20 years old at the time for that photo, one year younger than me, but she told me once that she was already married. She tended to keep it a secret, though, because the marriage had been a spur of the moment thing one year earlier, and she and the boy weren’t in love with each other anymore, but they just hadn’t bothered signing the divorce papers yet. I listened to this story with a mix of fascination and disbelief; falling in and out of love that quickly, going as far as getting married just for the fun of it, and then going back to being just friends… it almost sounded like something out of a novel to me.
That day when I took that picture of her, I came directly from the store where I had bought the camera; on the table you can see the box the roll of film had been in. So, she was my new camera’s first motive, although I took more photos of another girl, the girl I was in love with. (We lived in the same dorm.) That girl is also there in the little pile of photos in front of me, but I have better photos in an album. This is not as creepy as it sounds, I photographed everybody and she just happened to be around a lot… I mean, I wanted to be able to remember her forever but I wasn’t stalking her with the camera or anything! Well, the girl I was in love with was obviously the most wonderful person ever, in my eyes, but in a way I think my classmate was actually prettier.
It’s strange to remember how much I always was in awe of her, because she was so intelligent, talented, exquisitely pretty and blue-eyed, sweet and kind and also bold, brave, outgoing and seemingly unafraid of everything… but it wasn’t like I had a crush on her, despite all that, despite wanting to be closer to her. I think I mostly just wanted to be like her.
We’re Facebook “friends” now. I don’t know what she’s doing for a living, but she’s doing it in France, married to a Frenchman, and they have a one-year-old daughter.