Oldies

I love finding old photos that you had forgotten you had taken. It's like opening a time capsule and being taken right back to that very moment. It's like Proust with his madeleine cake dipped in tea. Sometimes the moment catches you off guard and you find yourself in a wave of sentiment and nostalgia. A similar feeling is describe by Roland Barthes in his epic Camera Lucida. The punctum, he says, exists in all photographs. It is that which leaps out of time frozen in an image and bruises you, hurts you. It rouses you an stirs something deep inside. Nostalgia is after all, mourning romanticised. Being taken back to that time only reminds us it is time gone, time we don't belong to anymore. As the saying goes though, 'you've got to leave the past behind you' (all moral lessons can be learnt from Lion King).