Amanda G. speaking:

This is the object I chose after thinking a lot about what I wanted to give you. I wanted something that wouldn’t have anything to do with no one else, like a love relationship or something like that. Something that would have more to do with me than with my relationships.

They are slides and I took them when I was 15 years old. Here is the custom that when you turn 15, it is an important date and often there is a big celebration. But in my family, it wasn’t a tradition. I received as a birthday gift an SLR camera and a trip to Egypt with my dad. My dad, for his work, traveled in different parts of the world. We went off the two of us for 10 days.

For me, I was starting to like photography and so I decided to bring with me the camera that I had asked for my birthday. I bought a roll of film but I didn’t know anything about photography at the time; I think I had just read one book. I bought, without knowing, a roll of slide but I didn’t realize until I got the film processed and the lab gave me a set of slides.

This object is very precious because it represents the moment of initiation to a series of travels that have been very important in my life, motivated and helped by my dad. They have been various trips far away in different places in the world. Right now, it is not like that anymore because I am independent and function differently. In this moment, these trips have been very important for me in many ways; they have changed a lot my way of thinking and it triggered lots of thinking at a very young age.

The other particularity of the object is that it had many problems; the take up spoon of the camera was stuck. So, I took out the film from the camera under a blanket not to burn the film.

 

I never saw them projected; I don’t know how they would come out. Some have are little burned, others are overexposed. It is not so much the value of the photos themselves; probably they are of bad quality. Five years later, I saw them in a small machine in which we can see slides. And four more years later, I could see them when I bought a photo scanner and managed to scan them. I always thought that one day I would see them projected. Ten years ago, to own a projector wasn’t something very accessible, no one had them in their house, but now it is much easier.I had them here, keeping them like an object that I didn’t want to detach myself from, but with the impossibility of being able to see them for a reason or another.