Photos: A Summer Memory in Italy
Editor’s Note: After publishing an excellent photo essay capturing San Franciscan decay earlier this year, photographer @_ghostlore returns with an offering from Italy, along with a short introduction.
There is something so incomprehensibly exceptional about a summertime memory that it is almost impossible to capture fully as a photo. It’s like trying to describe an early memory; the details are muddled, secondary to the emotion itself. Digital cameras, equipped with powerful sensors and ultra-sharp lenses, can easily fall short: they collect too many details, too clearly, and in grotesque quantities. In effect, they risk usurping the brain's proclivity for reconstitution and sentiment. I don’t remember my childhood family vacations for tedious flights or harrowing sunburns or crotchety exhaustion, I remember imperfectly. My subconscious continuously recolors those memories, favoring tones and shades that are useful to me. My mind recasts the sun beams falling against my skin, the biting odor of salt spray sent to mist by crashing waves.
These photos were taken this summer in Rome, Italy, and along the Amalfi Coast, an hour’s drive south of Naples. I used a point-and-shoot camera called an “Kodak Ektar H35”: a horribly flawed piece of equipment of questionable design topped off with a cheap plastic lens, no better than one of the countless disposable cameras my mom relied on to capture many choice moments from my youth. Though each photo can be loosely strung together with the next, there is no real precision or order to this set. My hope is that the imperfections of this photo set will allow any person to fill in the details, to build their own narrative, and to color them in with their own biases and personality. In this way I hope to mimic and emulate the facets of our mind that allow us to remember and retain the potent emotional content that makes up the bulk of our most cherished memories.
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