MATTHEW PLACEK
Written by Leo Herrera
There are no more photos in thrift stores. There was a time when every second-hand store had a box of random photographs or a shelf of albums with puffy foam covers. Graduations, family trips, a boy and his new car, a grandmother mid-laugh, mother and sister in matching feathered hair, dad’s furrowed brow, blurry, yellowed, damaged by album glue. Decades. Entire eras.
Did anyone really buy these second-hand memories? It was as if they were too sacred to just throw away, kept until the boxes filled up, until someone ripped out those photos for their own album.
Our photos no longer travel like dandelions after we die, they are locked behind a password. Yet there are more photos than ever before. No longer tied to the 36 exposures of rolls dropped off at a drug store, now we snap five photos of a cookie, they’re zapped into the cloud automatically, reproduced and shared endlessly. Consumed. But who will be there to catch the rain of memories if the clouds come down? Who would bother?
The concerts and parades, the cakes and salads we obsessively document, who is it for? Will we really watch that shaky footage of Lady Gaga later? Are we hoping a moment goes “viral?” That we had our phones out at the exact moment of catastrophe or a surprise proposal? That an image gains a life of its own, maybe outlives us, makes us famous?.
We are all asked to be storytellers now.
Humans are hardwired to share. Maybe we’re forging the all-seeing eye from science-fiction and fantasy novels. Maybe just pennies into a Heavenly data bank. A noble instinct? Oversharing is still sharing after all. Are we trying to replace memory with these images? If we succumb to dementia, will they jog it back? A telescopic record of a dead star.
Who are we without our retrospectives?
Some believed photographing someone takes a piece of their soul. What if it’s the opposite? What if the photographer leaves theirs? In the paradox of freezing time: When we snap the photo we step outside the moment. So in preserving it we also lose it. If we photographed a neighborhood or lover who no longer exists, did we salvage it or lose it a little more?
Yet it’s different for Queer people. We’ve had to piece together our history through polaroids and albums thrown away by family members. Polaroids of shirtless summers, lovers asleep in our bed (before the big fight). Selfies when we were a twink, flash on the bathroom mirror, before the extra pounds and the gray hair and beard. The friend who became wildly famous, the one who overdosed. Our images are archeological miracles.
So here is the “album” of one Queer person. Matthew Placek’s work and journey. Inheritance and lineage. 32 years. A person’s soul, in balloons, umbrellas and snow.