Hey,

Not many things can withstand the rigorous inquiry of perceptive eyes. Things are often prettier when you can’t see them.

The shutter always clicks much earlier before you can react. A snapshot of you, a recorded impression, now sits somewhere on the roll. You go on with your life, not knowing what is taken, with no way of checking the quality until that guy from the photoshop rings you. You are not in a hurry to hear from him, though. You are terrified of revisiting what was taken.

Because to see is to define, like a boundary-drawing exercise that contours what’s perceptible and what’s not. The moment something enters the aperture, you already make a decision to allow parts of it to surface and the rest to fade. The million possibilities of what could’ve grabbed the focus of your lens, catalyzing chemical reactions on the film, are all condensed to a definitive outcome, printed on a piece of squarely delimited inkjet paper. And one should really be more careful with what gets printed because, to most people’s dismay, it is not always easy on the eyes.

Most times, you are better off without having seen it all. Every imaginable potentiality is equally probable. Hence, some pleasant ones could still be. For example, Schrödinger‘s cat might still be alive if the physicist never opened the box. Or, in a completely unrelated example, the love of your life might still be in your shot if you never looked so closely.

But we just have to look for traces, to inspect each pixel, and to investigate each picture inside and out, don’t we? Now that you’ve seen it, the roll I fully developed for you. Is it still pretty, just like you thought it’d be?

Best,

Your photoshop guy