Photo Essay

This is the Starbucks sausage, egg and cheese I had for breakfast yesterday. It is disturbing that there isn't a single place near my work place which could, potentially, make a good egg and cheese sandwich. I can't even pretend to do a search because I know the place doesn't exist. That being said the Starbucks sandwich isn't bad. It's strange that they don't have pepper or salt in the store...they don't, I asked.

Last year I took an essay class. I liked it very much. I wrote, or began to write, a few pieces that have potential, 'If I Were Veronica Mars' being one of them. The other main essay with potential that I started was about photography and boys. In it I traced my progress and improvement (technically and conceptually) through my college's photo department. One aspect to this overall improvement was a project called: 'Boys Who Have Kissed Me On The Lips And Other Crushes'. The photographs that made up the project were all portraits of boys I had crushes on or had kissed up until that point in my life. I tracked down boys from elementary school and high school told them about the project then asked them if I could take their photograph. It was a large project. So, in my essay I wrote about finding my photographic eyes and, erm, cojones. I also wrote about the circumstances of all of the boys' photo shoots and original contexts (ie if I had kissed them or not/how). I put it aside when I started the Veronica essay because it had too many different elements going on for me to sort out at the time. Now I'm in the process of adding more units to the piece.

I'm tempted to add even more elements; to stuff the essay with every angle of thought I've ever had about how photographs function in my life and the relationships I had/have/didn't have with the people in them. For example, right now I'm fascinated by framed photographs and how as time goes by they, often, become less and less relevant to one's current life. I was talking to No-Longer-Wayward about it last night. There are, of course, the framed photographs of the ebf and myself that now live, un-looked at, in a drawer. I remember buying one of the frames and cutting a picture of the two of us at the beach to size so it would fit perfectly. (I'm imagining in my real essay about all of this including photographs of the frames. The photograph just mentioned would be inserted here). But that photograph is no longer something to display. Do I take out the photograph and put a new one in? It seems blasphemic (yeah, yeah, not a real word). Which brings me to other framed photographs I have in the apartment. What it comes down to (and what I said to No-Longer) is this: if some of the people in the photographs came to my house and saw that I had a photograph of myself and them framed and on my mantelpiece, they would be surprised and would, most likely, find it strange. And yet the image stays in the frame I put it it, even as the friendships explode or fade. There is one girl, in one of the photographs, who was a close friend my first year of college but by senior year we had very much gone our separate ways (kind of because I stopped talking to her) and yet there she is: in a frame with me and another college friend.

I'm just writing out loud now. Brainstorming, if you will, for a much better piece with all the above sentiments. But is it possible? Could I really track all the boys, my relationship to photography, stories about framed photographs and the strange way time keeps on ticking into the future in one piece. Or should I break each component down and write a series of essays. I'm not sure I have the material to write a lot of little pieces. What?

Framed photographs as small monuments to a person, place or time.