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| Photograph by Chris Blanchenot |
You were a child once. Your features and limbs were smaller. When you used to come into contact with people the same size you are now they looked big. They even scared you with their hugeness. You didn’t really suspect back then that you’d be as large as they were. We are all the right size now. We’re big enough to walk the streets unsupervised. We’re big enough to hold emotions we don’t understand.
There’s evidence of another time, a perfect square of remembrance. Start in a palace of old toys and bad furnishing and turn the pages. You will get bigger. You will get older in every picture. Family holidays, birthday parties and weddings, this is your life as it’s told in the book. From childhood to adolescence you were the one standing at the back with funny hair, scowling among parental smiles. And what happened to the photo-booth lovers? Ghosts framed in front of a ragged curtain, they smirked and gave themselves away. They would never look at you that way again; they would never look that way again for anyone.
The images will stop one day, but before they end you will get smaller just like the people that were bigger before you. You will shrivel and shrink. The eyes will dim and the smiles will no longer be there if you look hard enough. You will stand at the back with funny hair and a scowl that is there for a different reason. You will look at those photographs and notice you’ve already gone.
Christian Martius (2006)
From a Vancouver Zine.
