Photo
passing each other in silence2010/2024
Photos © Claudia Strate, C.B.
Title borrowed from Ursula K. Le Guin
When I pick up the developed photos months later, I am confused. How did I manage to double expose a film roll — again? I don’t remember any technical hiccup, like in Taiwan, when the camera suddenly rewound mid-film. Another question seems even more pressing: Where the hell was I?
When was this? What are these places, and who are these people? There must’ve been some kind of mixup in the development process. Then, the very last picture, a familiar face. My friend, smiling at someone, smiling at me now.
Photos on a roll of film she brought on her first solo trip to the mountains and coasts of Norway fourteen years ago, and that she was convinced went missing. They reappear, blended with the ones I took during our trip this summer. And here we are, walking through the ghostly shapes of a world she thought she had lost, and that had been with her for thousands of days, silently preserved in the cold. We were both reading Earthsea at the time. And look
where we were.
It was a year of grieving, of anger and of doubts,
It was a year of grieving, of anger and of doubts,
but it was also the year we went to Earthsea.