moving backwards

One day in Elsewhere, one of my colleagues was taking photos of himself. This is very common in Africa, and you often end up being given photographs of your friends and neighbors doing things like standing proudly, head thrown back, on a large rock, or giving you a thumbs up from a plastic chair in front of a plastic mountain backdrop, with feet extended toward you so they are larger than his head. This is mostly a male thing (the strange poses, although not the taking pictures of oneself, alone), and I don’t really understand the urge to have photos of oneself, alone, in unnatural poses and places. But this is what we call a cultural difference, I presume, and my colleagues never seem to understand why I don’t want my picture taken all alone and why I push to have the pictures of me taken with other people. It’s a live and let live situation.

Anyway, this colleague, who I didn’t actually know very well because he was sort of a distant colleague, was taking photos of himself. I was sharing around some Nice™ Coconut biscuits, and I offered him one. “Photo!” he said, so his photographer snapped a picture.

A few days later, he gave me the picture of the two of us.

I love this photograph. Not because I’m particularly close to this guy or because I particularly want to remember the mundane moment of sharing the biscuits, but because it looks thirty years old. It is the size and shape of a modern photograph, but it has a white border like an old photograph. The colors are a little faded, as photographs developed on ancient equipment in Africa often are, as old photographs often are. The photograph is of a girl in a golden yellow t-shirt and jeans, with long straight dark-blond hair parted in the middle, offering a box of cookies to a guy with longish hair and a beard who is leaning back in a metal folding chair. (Alternatively, it is of a guy with longish hair and a beard who is leaning back in a metal folding chair, taking a cookie from a box offered by a girl in a golden yellow t-shirt and jeans with long straight dark-blond hair parted in the middle. I suppose that depends on your perspective but, you see, I’m the one writing this, and like most people, I’m the first person I look at in a photograph because you never know when I might look heinous.) The rest of the photo is taken up with a guava tree, the grass, and the brick of the building. Not only does the quality of the photograph look like the 70s, but so do both of us. I have a funny sensation of being in two times at once every time I look at it. I have a funny sensation that the girl in the photograph, despite her hair color, could be my mother.