Photograph: Diving

I have always taken photos. Ever since I was young I carried a camera. I took the photos and spent my own babysitting money to get the film developed. I even sent the film away by mail for processing because it was way cheaper to do it that way rather than dropping it off at the camera store. Unfortunately, socializing became the most important thing to me and even though I still took photos, I wasn’t interested in photographs as an art form. Also unfortunate, I lost a lot of my childhood photos to a flood that occurred when I was around nineteen years old.

I still take a ton of photos. While I was looking through photos for the post I did yesterday I had a walk down memory lane. Even though the photo is just an image of a moment, I realized there’s so much more going on a photograph. Each photo is a complex story, which I’ve decided to write about here.

I am going to start posting a single image or a series of images and write the story about what is really happening in the image. Most of my photographs are snapshots, and they didn’t require any setup. I also realized I have some strange obsession with collecting photos I’ve taken of strangers and in my imagination I write the stories of those strangers.

I will start with one random photo:

It was 1982. I was snorkeling in Jamaica while on my honeymoon. We got married on a Saturday and by Sunday afternoon we were on the island. It took a day or two to recover from all the drinking and cocaine I did on my wedding night. As my head became more clear I was overcome with a feeling of terrible doom.

 ”What the fuck did I do?”  I kept thinking,  “How am I going to get out of this?”

I knew getting married was a terrible mistake from the moment I got married. I suddenly felt like a noose had been wrapped around my neck and I was grasping to free myself from the stupid piece of paper I signed just a few nights before. I got hit with a really bad wave of depression on our trip and even though my ex-husband tried to make it as special as he could, I was in a total funk. I didn’t share with him how I was feeling. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to share my feelings and what was I going to say? “Ummmm…I decided last night was a big mistake.”

This wasn’t a one night stand, we had planned our wedding for ten months.

The marijuana we scored from the Rastas  didn’t help with my terrible anxiety. After smoking that shit I spent one night glued to the bed feeling like there was a lead weight on my chest and having one of the worst panic attacks of my life.

I did make it out to see Jamaica, which was really pretty, yet very depressing at the same time. It’s the only time I’ve ever been to one of the islands because I realized that the people who lived on the islands lived in near poverty while these huge resorts brought in all kinds of money. The hotel urged the costumers not to leave the resort, but I wasn’t one to go on a vacation and be stuck in a hotel all week. I wanted to see how people really lived on the island.

As young as I was still very uncomfortable with the obvious segregation between the resorts and the natives. It bothered me and I haven’t been on a “resort” vacation since.