I Collect Moments & Nostalgia’s Teeth off the Floor ⋆

A (Mostly) Visual Essay on Photography, Nostalgia and RE:EASA

Author: Sotiris Frankos

I started taking photos back when I was severely depressed. Or, more accurately, I started taking photos because I was severely depressed. It was a way to force myself to look consciously for the beauty in things. I promise this is not a sob story (although it does serve the purpose of quickly humanizing me to an audience of complete strangers too, I guess), and it is actually relevant to what follows. Because, in a way, these photos of EASA Croatia represent the same sentiment.

The people pictured were exhausted, either because they slept too late, or because my snoring was too loud. Perhaps their workshop required them to stay until after dinner – this is the stuff that lights the fires of entire revolutions. Unless they’re eating in the pictures, they were most likely hungry. And they probably did need a shower.

Then some time passes and it’s just you and your fallible, fading memories, and if you’re lucky, some photos to help you out as well. And as you look at them you realize that everything that might have seemed uncomfortable in the moment is now small and insignificant but the friends are still there and the entire experience seems to have somehow ended up as more than the sum of its parts. It is sort of bittersweet, because you know that this will never happen again, not with the same people, not at the same place. So you spend the rest of your life remembering it and thinking “Wasn’t that nice?”. You grow up and you have children and you get old and they have their own children too, and you tell them, sitting on your rocking chair next to a fireplace on a cold winter night about that one incredible time you went to Croatia and met interesting people and worked on things with them and for a tiny little bit escaped your otherwise mediocre/decent (take your pick) life. Well, at least that’s one way to do it.

Nothing in the universe is truly unique, though – not even you, no matter what your mother tells you – and these pictures should serve as a reminder of that as well. A reminder that sometimes you should just punch nostalgia in the face and use it as motivation to make something as good, if not better, happen again. Something new to take pictures of. Don’t look behind for the best of times, look ahead. It doesn’t look like they’re coming? Well, make’em. You’re a big boy/girl/person now. You don’t get to see nostalgia’s smile unless it’s bleeding, with teeth missing.

That’s why I take photos. And it’s also why EASA endures, and why we keep going back to it. But I digress, I should probably let the photos speak for themselves now.