6.18.2008

Images Before Words

I spent the weekend in memory. Memory, as if it were a place. A passerby, had there been one, pausing long enough to peek into my bedroom would have seen me deep in a task. Surrounded by trays of slides, a scanner propped before me, laptop tethered, I loaded and scanned, loaded and scanned. The buzz of equipment musically augmented the scene. I was in the room and so very far away at the same time.

I am coming up on twenty years or twenty years are coming up on me. You pick. This mark of time prompted action, forced me to tick a chore off a list. Rent scanner. Scan slides. One weekend. Seven hours of immobility. Images and memories and colors and emotion.



1988. The Soviet Union. 500 participants. Multiple nationalities walking under the banner of Soviet-American Peace Walk. Odessa to Kiev with three capping days in Moscow. Tents and sleeping bags and bureaucracy and new friendships. Frustration and final tears. So much, so very much.

I pore through the images. The stories return. The need to capture knocking at my mind. This is just a beginning, a nod to maybe. How much will I present? How much will I revisit? I can’t say. I won’t say. I will show. Image by image. A start. A nudge. A beginning. We shall see…



11 comments:

Girlplustwo said...

De, these memories, they must be seared deep inside.

Anonymous said...

"We shall see ..." Oh good. I very much want to see. 1988 ... 20 years ... Spots ... I am overwhelmed with the anniversaries we are marking. I love reading your elegant expression of what I am experiencing too.

Voix said...

Great photos! What kind of scanner did you get to do the slides? I've got a bunch of my mom's slides from her trip to France in '67 that I'd love to have access to.

deezee said...

Voix, I rented a Nikon 5000. Great quality scans, but I had to load one at a time, which was slow, slow, slow! There may be an adapter for stack loading, but I didn't have one. And I scanned at 4000 pixels, so have a lot of hard drive space available!

- deezee

Anonymous said...

100% honest day: What is your "other writing," and does it pertain to this post?

deezee said...

Dana,

No, but it should because I've sworn that I was going to write something before August, the 20th anniversary of this event. Who knows, maybe I can still pull it off?

The other writing...gulp. Long form fiction. Yep. The word that starts with n and ends with l. It scares me to somewhat publicly declare that. Now I must pull it off...

(and there are other little things here and there, fiction and short essays that are getting submitted. a few short photography-related pieces have been bought. if you want the links, email me...)

- deezee

Anonymous said...

I wantz de linkz. Send!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the links. Now another question: Do you still like blogging?

deezee said...

Dana,

I have a complicated relationship with blogging right now. It's a very long answer, more likely to be posted on your site or as part of the next 100% honest day. (cuz the day has passed and I don't have to be all open and honest right now, not when I can close my eyes and take a little rest...)

- deezee

Willie Baronet said...

Love that photo of the little girls...

and how come you don't link to me?

SuperP. said...

Beautiful pictures, absolutely beautiful.