637 - Painted From Memory

These are the images of Friday. It took me two days of pondering about a half-written post to come to the conclusion, that I can’t make rhyme nor reason of it. I finally threw it away.

What’s remains are three images of Friday morning, that depict old things neglected (like this rusty, dusty door to a cellar), old things carefully restored (like the Russian motorbike), or things that are not old at all but were produced to look old (“retro” is the term, like my fan). For me there is a deep satisfaction in photographing old things, but in talking of that, I ought to make distinctions as to the kind of old I mean.

Gothic cathedrals and ancient monuments are like landscapes to me. They are beautiful, interesting, they may cause my mind go off dreaming, but intrinsically they rarely move me. What moves me, are old things that I can relate to. Things that were made before my time, just not centuries, more like a life-span or two. I mean things that would have been there in my childhood, things that would already have looked old then.

In a comment to 633 - Undecided, dkwett suggested that what we capture in a photograph isn’t so much a vision as a memory, and while I don’t think that this is generally true (or if so, then in a very subtle way), I guess it is the key to the sentiments that I talk here. These are images painted from memory.

In all these images there is a part of myself, only sometimes it is more literally so, as sometimes there is a self-portrait hidden within 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Painted From Memory” from Elvis Costello’s 1998 cooperation with Burt Bacharach. Hear the song on YouTube.