A slice of time in my pocket …
What do people carry in their pockets? Nowadays it’s a mobile phone, containing most of their lives. In the 70s it was a wallet (for the males).
BACKGROUND
I belong to a group of former school friends, Co67, class of 67. We met this month and were talking about something or other and it reminded me that I had some boxes in the attic, and one from my parents’ house had old photos, Valentine cards, school reports, a travel chess set, a slide rule and set squares. My mother was a hoarder and I take after her.
I took down one of the boxes. Dust stuck to my sweatshirt and pants. The tattered cardboard box wasn’t the one I’d expected. Instead I saw this wallet among bags of letters and packets of photos and negatives. I knew it wasn’t the wallet I used in the 60s, because that one had been black and rectangular, hand made by my father, and I still have it. This wallet looked so tattered and flimsy I didn’t think there would be anything in it, but there was …
THOUGHTS ON CONTEXT
We are composed in some way of our past, present and future; memories, actions and plans; experiences, prejudices and learnings; accidents, accumulated knowledge and external events. Making a crude analogy with photography, in the words of Ansel Adams, “You don’t make a photograph with just a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” Another cruder analogy of my own is that (I haven’t quite worked this out yet!) … a comparison of the layers that make up an image edited in Photoshop, or other image editor, to the contents of my wallet and the slice of my life at the time I used it. Also, and perhaps more important, the feelings and memories evoked now by the items in this wallet and the wallet itself. Could this be a good theme? I think I should pursue it for a while and see what happens.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
On first opening the wallet, I took out some sheets of paper and, at first, I didn’t recognise the name there at all. Then I noticed the dates, and I realized that this wallet was from the period I spent in Canada, working as a Teaching Assistant and doing a MSc. in Physics at a university there. Every thing in the wallet brought back memories and released feelings It captured a slice of time for me. I bought my first serious camera then too, and there were some negatives in a packet under the wallet.
THE WALLET
I think this type of wallet was in fashion at that time, the mid-seventies. An orangey-red colour, thin leather, embossed relief oriental design. ( found a different, unused one in the box too.) It was a small size that would fit in a back pocket …
and then I smiled. A hot, sunny day, tennis with a girlfriend, too tight white shorts (mine), trying to reach this faded and sweaty wallet in my back pocket.
