Introduction
these are pictures of my mother, with whom i have a devoted and sometimes tempestuous relationship. these are pictures of my mother when she was younger than i am now, and with her future still full before her: clear, white, unpunctuated space. she was eighteen or nineteen when they were taken, by an american g.i. she was dating at the time in manila. it was before she had met my father, whom she would marry after dating for six months.
i can't know precisely why these photos have always moved me so. maybe it is the knowledge that when they were taken her life was stretched out before her, full of possibility. that when they were taken, perhaps because she hadn't met my father yet, her face did not have the look it would have once her destiny had been set. the course of her life decided. not that it was an unhappy course, just that prior to these photos it was unknown; it had yet to occur.
these photos were "taken" by me when i moved out of the house, and, being the image monger that i am, swiped many family photos. my mother hadn't realized i took them, perhaps not even realizing that she had kept them, until i brought them up many years later. who was he? did you date long? what did you think of him taking all these photos of you?
do these then qualify as "found photos?" it's funny, but i find faces my mother makes in these pictures that i've caught myself making throughout my life, long before i even knew these pictures existed.
you are who you are before you even got here.
