Lost and Found
In 2018, I bought a film camera online. I don't remember where I found it and I can't find any record of buying it. I wish I could. If I could contact the seller, I might be able to answer these questions that have sometimes kept me up at night ever since. Because when it arrived in the mail, I discovered it had a small roll of film inside, already developed.
I took the film down to Mike's Camera, the local camera shop, to be developed. A few days later, the guy at the lab called to tell me they did their best, but the film was so expired, that most of the frames didn't make it.
These are the photos that survived. They have haunted me ever since I saw them. Who is this man? Where in the world was he? And When? The camera was a Nikon F3, first introduced in 1980, so the photos are no older than that.
There is an intimacy to these photos that gives a sweetness to the relationship between this man and those around him. Shaving. Looking in a mirror. Such simple, domestic duties that don't seem to have been photographed for any reason other than to document time spent together. Maybe it was a rare meeting. Maybe it was their last.
Was this his home? Something tells me it was not. Who was behind the camera? I like to think it was his son.
But these feelings that I've most likely erroneously applied to these photos make it even more strange to think this roll of film was forgotten inside a forgotten camera. What happened to the photographer that lead to losing such special photos? Was the camera stolen and then traded for groceries in Morocco? Or was it left on top of the Land Rover in Belarus and the photographer drove off, unaware of the sadness he would feel when he realized he lost the last photos of his father? Or maybe the photographer was a famous National Geographic traveler on his way through Damascus and the camera was confiscated at Customs when he returned to New York.
Maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe these photos were taken by nurses at a nursing home, an inside joke of ol' What's-his-name who keeps trying to shave even though they took out all his razor blades.
Or maybe the photos were taken by kidnappers, intended for his family on the other side of the world as proof of life to demand a ransom.
Maybe. Or maybe the story is something completely different, some other tragic, mean, or depressing scenario. All I could ever say about these photos starts with the word, maybe. I will never know the truth. So I have given these photos a story of love, of late apologies and forgiving, and a tender commitment to an aging relative.
Of course, this man never could have imagined these photos would end up in some stranger's hands, posted on the internet, or printed in a magazine. I hope he wouldn't have minded.
Receiving these photos was one of my first lessons in the power of film, the power of a tangible analog thing that you could hold in your hand, a thing that could travel around the world, one you could buy, sell, lose, trade, forget about in a shoebox in the closet so your granddaughter could sell it on Craigslist, only to be discovered by an excited photographer buying his first film camera decades later. This medium for storytelling, this permanency, has my gratitude in a world of fleeting moments.
