Brodie had a portrait in his hands, it was a photo he had taken decades ago. The photograph was already yellowed by time, it showed a group of children playing at the edge of a sunflower field. That photo was simple, without artifice, but special because it had been the first photograph he had taken with his camera. So much time had passed that he did not even remember the names of those children, possibly many of them were already as old as he was, since when he took that photograph he was barely 14 years old. He took it with a camera that his father gave him. It was a fairly cheap camera with poor quality lenses but it was the beginning of the great photographer that Brodie would become in the future.
He had been sitting in his studio for hours, surrounded by piles of photos that seemed to shout out forgotten stories, so to speak. Many of those situations or moments captured in an image no longer existed. In the case of people, many of them had died and others no longer remembered those days. So to speak, all those stories were only in Brodie's mind, who was also beginning to forget due to his advanced age. When he looked at those images, he knew that time was not on his side. He was reaching the final stage of his life and those photos reminded him of that.
But he decided that it was time to do something with everything he had accumulated, with every image he had taken and the memories they contained. But he didn't want a book or an exhibition. What he wanted was not entirely clear, not even to him. All he knew was that he had to go out. He took a trip with a vague, almost improvised route. He packed his old camera, some rolls of film and a notebook where he wrote names of places that he had in his memory. He didn't want to plan too much. Somehow he felt that spontaneity would give him back something he had lost, as he would say, the spark of the unexpected. His first stop was his hometown, a small town that now seemed almost unreal to him, as it had changed so much since he moved away from here in his youth. He even walked the streets like a ghost, seeing how time had transformed what he once knew. The house where he grew up was still standing, but its colors had faded, and the faces that greeted him from the doors were no longer familiar.
Near the center of town, he found a market that looked just like the one from his childhood. Here he took his first photo of the trip, a woman with her back turned, her gray hair tied back in a bun, examining fruit with the same precision that Brodie remembered of his own mother. His mother used to buy fruit right there and dressed similarly. That's why he chose her to take the photo. But that woman wasn't the only memory he managed to recreate, because at each stop on the trip he was confronted with a different kind of memory. In a big city where he had spent much of his career, he stopped in front of a now-closed newspaper building. He had worked there during the most frenetic years of his life, rushing to deliver photos that he rarely looked at again. When he pointed his camera at the broken windows and the facade, he thought about how he had sacrificed so much to stay on top of that demanding job.
He remembered that in those days he had to work as a photojournalist to get by because he didn't have enough funds to set up a studio. So it seemed easier for him to work for that newspaper. The photo he took of this place served to remind him of those moments, but rather to relive them, which was in parts the reason for this journey against time. By the way, just as he took the photo, a young woman approached him and asked him what he was photographing. When he explained, she laughed and said that she had always thought that the building had been a factory. She had moved to the city a few years ago and did not know much about the local history. She told him that she also liked street photography. At that moment, Brodie did not want to tell her that the reason for his trip was not only to take photos, it was to relive the important moments that he had in his best photos before he died. He only told her that he liked it too. And that was the end of the conversation.
Besides the good times he was remembering on this trip, not all the memories were comforting. When he went to a beach where he had taken photos of his children, Brodie remembered a summer in which he had left someone waiting too long for a decision that he never made. That person was no longer in his life, and the beach itself had changed over the years. It was his wife, they had divorced not long before taking the photo, she wanted to get back with him, but he never made the decision. So that photo brought back bad memories, but he needed to relive them. It wasn't about reliving what was lost, it was about recognizing that sometimes decisions have a time limit.
After the beach he went straight by taxi to a mountain. There he had camped during his youth, with a group of friends who now only lived in his memories, it was there that he took his first photo, the photo of the children and the sunflowers. This is where it all began, now he was at the beginning of his entire career and his history as a photographer. To commemorate that moment he called his friends and some of those children who were now older people to make a bonfire together and spend the night remembering good times. And so it happened, it was a spectacular night and almost everyone came. To complete the experience Brodie told everyone to stand in the sunflower field, or at least in the same position where he once was to recreate his first photograph. When he took it it was hard to see it because he saw that many of those who were originally there were no longer there, but it comforted him to know that everything he was doing was to remember them and live again in his memories.
That day was not the end of the trip, in fact, Brodie never announced that it was over. He returned to his studio and left the photos in an unlabeled box, along with a brief note that read, “For whoever wants to look.” He did not organize an exhibition or write a book. The images remained as a testimony to a life lived with imperfections, but full of beauty. Years later, someone would find the box, it would be one of his children, he would continue his journey.
Credits: The images used are free to use and royalty free. They were taken from pixabay.