Snapshots: Fantasy

I have only one blurred photo of my dad, from the year he met my mother. This is also the year that he left her and disappeared forever, from our lives and (as I would discover when I went looking) from the world itself, to all appearances. In the photo, he's of middling age, not quite young anymore but not old either, though his hairline has started creeping back at his temples. He wears a punk leather jacket, and he's shooting a photo with an antique brownie camera. The camera is the only thing left of him, and my mother presented it to me ceremoniously at my high school graduation. I've never used it. I'm not really a camera freak, and even if I was, I'm too broke to afford specialty film and the cost of developing the photos. Cellphone photos snapped and sent through Instagram is more my style, if I have a style. I guess I do. I try not to be one of those people who only posts pictures of their food and their friends having more fun than they are. I take pictures of the people that other people look past. Homeless people, crazy-talking guys on street corners, the dangerous-looking thugs who hang out at the corners, that people look away from in case they look back. Like looking away from trouble would ever help anything. I don't get a whole lot of comments on my snapshots, though once some lady who ran an art gallery in a hairdressing saloon said that she'd do an exhibit for me, if I wanted. At the time, I mostly wanted a job sweeping up hair, and I sure didn't have the money to get big prints made of my crappy little cellphone photos. It's not like I have a top-of-the-line cell, either. I'm lucky the thing even has a camera. Forget megapixels and sensor size, it could be a shadow box for as modern as it is.


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gauthierdumonde/9901186963/
Story potential: High.
Notes: I do like where this is going. And it positively reeks of symbolic resonance.