Two years ago, I wrote here about “the blackout years”: that brief period in the early ’00s when I didn’t own a camera, and before going out into social situations meant a Magnum Photo Agency’s worth of cameras were going to be documenting every aspect of the evening:
I wonder if this is something that sounds familiar to you if you’re in your late 20s or early 30s. The obsessive need to document every aspect of one’s life doesn’t seem like it was a part of the cultural landscape until the mid-2000s, with the advent of social media and Flickr and Friendster and cellphone cameras. I thought of this kind of constant photographic documentation as something that my parents did, or perhaps something limited to the group of college friends I had that were studying photography and always carrying around Polaroid and Pentax cameras. There are rolls and roll of images from my childhood and teenage years, mostly snapped by my parents. My life since 2004 or so has been documented more than adequately; my Facebook photo page contains well over 100 from the last two years alone. But on my own for the first time after high school, out in the world, unbearded, it’s comparatively sparse. What few there are tend to be Polaroids, art projects roommates were working on, or packets of blurry Walgreens-developed 4x6s.
And, in particular:
I do not have — and this seems shocking, but I’m pretty sure it’s completely true — a single photo of me with any girl I dated through that entire time. Not even my college girlfriend, whom I was with for two years. I have a few lone snapshots of one or two of them, but nothing that would ever indicate we were ever in the same room together. A whole sub-generation of Canadian girlfriends!
Last night on Facebook, I was looking through some photos someone had uploaded from what look like print photos in 2004 of a show at the Phoenix Hill Tavern, back in Louisville. And in three or four in particular, of Nate in a Mexican wrestling mask drunkenly yelling something at disinterested-looking locals, there in the background — me and the college girlfriend in question. And as far as I know, that’s it. There are no other photos of us. I was surprised to find them, hiding there in plain sight. Surprised, and a little touched, oddly. Is is possible that’s all that’s left? I really think it is. Maybe I ought to write her and she if she has any — we’re still sporadically in touch, but I’ve never asked. I just don’t remember there being many cameras around then.
I have been wondering if I had been writing too much about my early 20s lately, a time that was, in many respects, less interesting and rewarding than right now. I feel better now about my life and what I am doing with it right now than I ever have, by far. But I guess it’s so easy to mythologize that time, because unlike now, there’s no electronic paper trail to refer back to. I didn’t have a blog or a journal. I don’t have access to the Yahoo email account I used during that time. There aren’t many photos. The art I made in that era has been dispersed throughout a series of apartments of people I don’t know anymore. Any writing I did was pretty limited to undergraduate academic papers. A couple sketchbooks and some paper archives — but compared to the massive quantity of information there is on my various exploits in the past five or six years, it’s pretty thin. I mean, in many respects, it may as well have been twenty years ago.
All that’s left, really, are stories. So I keep telling them, over and over and over.
