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A Photograph That Ages With Me
My skin wrinkles — why should this photograph fare any better?
Twenty-five years ago, I took this photograph with a pinhole camera on Kodak TX film. My son was five. Too small to reach the toilet, he needed a little stool to sit on the throne.
I enlarged the negative using lith printing — a process ruled by chance as much as by control. No print is ever quite the same.
Over the years, the image began to change. Traces of metallic silver appeared, caused by exhausted fixer and imperfect washing. At first, I saw it as damage. Then I noticed where it gathered.
His face.
The photograph aged selectively, unevenly, as if time had made a choice.
I love images that refuse to stay fixed. That respond, shift, and carry their own histories.
When I open the bathroom door, I don’t just see a photograph.
I see the years it has lived — alongside me.
