Last summer I scanned the pictures I took when I was a journalist. Those fragments of past instants now float in the remote immateriality of a digital cloud. For that, they have acquired a new, different life.
There I am, slurping a bowl of noodles. I am covered in some white stuff, and so are the two guys sharing the table with me. On the table, the usual paraphernalia for this kind of street food in Thailand: spoons, chopsticks, sauces. We are under a tarp, in the shade. In the sun, the temperature must be quite hot, as suggested by the sharp contrast between the dark and the bright parts of the picture. Hard to take photos in those conditions… And I did not take. somebody else did, using my camera, as i still have the picture. There is a lady in the back who seems to be cooking, and another table of customers, wearing more formal clothes than I am. On the frame of this slide I had written “Hua Hin:” it is a beach resort town in the Thai part of the Malay peninsula. No date, but when I saw this picture I remembered a trip I took with a bunch of guys I had met in Bangkok. I can presume it was 1993 or 1994, in one of my early trips to Thailand.
We were staying in a house that belonged to the aunt of one of them. I have clear memories of it. All built in wood, on stilts, it didn’t have actual walls, but rather sliding shutters that could be opened at night to enjoy some breeze. There were no beds. We slept on woven mats, but we did have mosquito nets. It was also the first time I tasted Laotian food: actually, my hosts were eagerly observing me while I put some of it my mouth. They were expecting a reaction because that meal (it some some sort of ground meet with a red sauce) was unbelievably spicy. They got a good laugh out of it… At the time, food was not my professional focus, but I was already very curious about it, as another entryway to cultures I was not familiar with. Tasting, sharing meals allowed me to get to know new sensory worlds. We had traveled to Hua Hin to take part in a festival during which people threw water and flour on each other for fun. Until I saw this picture, I had no recollection of this episode. I have googled Hua Hin, but I cannot find any mention of that kind of festival. Yet there we are, covered in sticky flour hardening in the heat. So many bits and pieces of that trip came back to me. Just one of the many splinters of my past, often unmoored, out of context, but rich of sensory details, which I accessed while looking at my old slides.
Last summer I was lucky enough to be back in Rome, my hometown, for a few weeks. Even better, I was on vacation, with no urgent projects to fret about. So I decided to go through my collection of slides. When I was working as a journalist (at first in international affairs and later in food), I used to take pictures while traveling. If fact, I often sold the pictures together with my stories. At the time, for quite a few years, the industry standard for this kind of work was transparent slides. Digital cameras were yet to come… Inevitably, I accumulated tons of slides. Very few of them actually made it to print. The rest was kept in an enormous box, the size of a large suitcase, under my bed in Rome.
The problem with that is that slides are made of some sort of plastic, and they deteriorate over time. I had long been aware that I risked losing such an important repository of memories and past experiences. I finally bought a slide scanner, which is in itself become a piece of digital archaeology, as slides have not been used for quite some time so there is no longer need for machinery to scan them. As a matter of fact, the software that came with the scanner did not work too well with my up-to-date Mac, so I ended up doing all the work at my mother’s, who has an older computer that runs a not-so-new version of Windows. Luckily, it worked.
It was a long and painstaking process. First, I had to check all the slides and decide which I would keep and which I would get rid of: dark ones, ugly ones, uninteresting ones, the ones showing my finger. I was sad to throw them out, because they reminded me of the actual labor that went into traveling, interviewing, and gathering information. However, I decided to set aside those who spoke to me in the present: my selection would not be a museum, but rather an ongoing dialogue with my current interests and research. It is a limited and limiting perspective, but I had to pick a doable approach: ask any curator about this… Then, among the hundreds I decided to keep, I selected those that I would actually scan, in good quality. I could not scan all the ones that would be keeping, because it would have taken forever.
I got down to work. Frame after frame after frame, the brittle rectangles of film reminded me of the unassuming and often invisible dissolution of mechanical reproduction. Chasing those fading shadows required the resolute focus of an amanuensis fighting moldy rot gnawing at parchments (except that the copier was not the author, like in my case). Each snapshot I examined announced the shortcomings of my memory, offering reflexes of moments I had almost forgotten for no good reason.
The process made me aware that those pictures had the potential to share what my words could not, what my memory wouldn’t have retained unless it had been branded by fear or elation. Emotional memories are durable, however not more reliable than the less momentous ones. Gorgeous minute incidents — trivial, useless— would have melt away otherwise, dissolved among more pressing worries. Irrelevant, inconsequential, those memories hibernated in plastic. Now they will survive in the remote immateriality of a digital cloud, and for that they will acquire a new, different life. I also transferred the files to a USB drive, just in case…
Those images will remain within easy reach, to be perused when the dread of decay and forgetfulness will beg for a refresher. They will be safe, until I browse them to recollect. Or just out of boredom. Or to share them on social media, as I have started to do. In fact, the scanning effort took place while I was also reflecting on the revisions of a new book manuscript about the ideological uses of food in politics. I don’t think it was serendipitous. In fact, reading, thinking, and writing about food in politics brought back my interest in political science, international events, and current affairs, which have provided most of the content for the new book. In a way, I was going full circle: from international affairs reporter to food writer to food scholar, and now back again to international affairs but through the specific lens of food. The slides provided great fuel for the book project.
The landslide of shots (close ups, portraits, landscapes, details) have survived as a pliable testament to the illusion that guided my early days as a young traveler, looking for immovable facts and granitic events. Freed from the tinsel of the inevitable nostalgia that imbued every click from the start, the plastic transparencies spat out their flimsy, transitory truths, mirages of a reality that was supposed to exist of its own volition outside my recollections.
I have been recently discussing with my grad students the importance of visual supports in ethnographic research, as at times images can juggle details, feelings, sensations, atmospheres that may have slipped through the words of the field notes. However, as I went through the slides I not always knew precisely what I was looking at. Who were those people? What place was that? Some slides carried telegraphic captions on their plastic or carton frames, hurriedly scribbled, smudged, inconsequent. Some didn’t, for no apparent reason. The puzzle is not the objects or the exotic faces staring out of the shots, immutable, stunned, but what prompted my finger to freeze that precise instant, that one and not others, the stories spun and told as they unfolded. The journalist, the photographer, and the historian in me now vie to control a long-forgotten narrative. Decades later, emotions and sensations are all that’s left, a consolation to the scholar.