Ghost Train RadioExhuming My Past
I had a great experience today going back over film negatives of my time in Europe in the 1980’s. I was into street photography, and because I was a visitor and in many countries didn’t speak the language – I was bolder than when I’m in the US (although that has changed with age). Now I am no longer so self conscious.
I’ll never visit most of those cities, towns and countries again, and I doubt that I could do what I did then – spend my free time walking all day with a camera.
But finding quite a few excellent compositions after just looking at the first three archival sheets of film of my time in Amsterdam, and its like I had given myself a gift of myself dating back over 30 years ago. I stumbled on gold. I’m so glad I had that presence of mind in my late 20’s.
When I got back home to San Francisco just before 1990, I just put the slides and black and white film away in archival sleeves in archival binders. I cherry picked the best of the best and printed those but missed so many others, images that have been “exhumed”. I’m like a kid at Christmas who received a surprise gift of a lifetime (literally).
What a fantastic day it was today!
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