Making An Archive

As days blend into each other, one year into our reality being shapeshifted, I’ve found myself being attached, more so than usual, to possessions, material or otherwise. Anything before circa 2020 is an heirloom of a past that yearns to be lived. Cancelled concert tickets, free passes to the Academy - to what extent can one latch onto the past to make sense of the present? While this notion of past-possession may seem dated, seeing as we are a whole year into this soul-crushing calamity, some of us - arguably, most of us - see the future as an extension of our past, not our present. Last year was 2019 and if people are to refer to 2020, they call it twenty-twenty.

The only way to retrieve the past, or make an attempt at reliving it is through the only tangible evidence we possess from it: photographs. I have admittedly found myself going through my Instagram profile time and time again, just to appease myself with snapshots of “what once was.” That freshmen reading week trip when I first got a disposable and clicked what I believe to be every window in Venice. Or the time we cut my friend’s hair in the cubicle that was halls’ bathroom. “Good old days” primarily exist in the face of monotony and after a year of being holed up inside, photographs have proven to be my sole antidote. This isn’t to say that yearning is constrained to a polaroid that captured a moment in time but to emphasise, in retrospect, how glad I am to have documented all my days.

Most ‘finstas’ as of late are less haha-cannot-post-this-because-I’m-too-embarrassed and more an archival account of life. The same people that often questioned (read: critiqued) the concept of taking a photo of every meal have now jumped on the bandwagon to click every outfit-of-the-day, be it just for zoom. This culture of embracing every passing second is new and surprisingly, it encompasses both active and inactive moments. At the expense of romanticising life as though it were a Pixar movie, people have found pleasure in the mundane. From trees to clouds, there are a host of accounts dedicated to what would once be deemed trivial. Had it not been for the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, would we have embraced St. Stephen’s Green as we do now? In this day and age of commodification, parks too have fan pages documenting all their seasonal glory. Unarguably, the best part about this newly established culture is people all over the world, espousing the same idea. Despite being separated by millions of miles, nostalgia for the past has universally united people and eerily enough, everyone is responding to it similarly: yearning through/for past experiences via amassed visual evidence.

Photography, I have realised, doesn’t have to be about the perfect subject, sight or lighting. More so than anything, it’s about finding a frame for that fleeting feeling. God only knows what ‘cloud’ is but with the way Apple keeps reminding me I’m out of iCloud storage now is...almost comforting. I can only hope it means the irrepressible amount of photographs that are stacking up.

WORDS BY ADITI KAPOOR