Last August I found a Western Digital passport drive wedged behind a bookshelf in my old apartment in Bushwick. It was the color of a faded sunset, that particular shade of coral that every electronics manufacturer abandoned around 2013. I plugged it into my laptop expecting nothing. What came back were 4,200 JPEGs from the summer of 2010 — a summer I had completely overwritten in my mind with the narrative I told about it later.
The Color of Forgetting
The photos were terrible and perfect. Every single one was overexposed, blown out at the edges where the sun hit the lens. My old Canon point-and-shoot had no idea what to do with that much light. Faces dissolved into white halos. The ocean became a flat silver plane. And yet these broken images felt more honest than anything I had taken since — because they captured not the moment, but the feeling of trying to hold onto it.
We don't photograph things to remember them. We photograph things to prove we were the kind of person who noticed.