The Power of Photos

I spent some time today looking through old Facebook photos. I was a little late to Facebook - I didn't get an account until, I believe, 2010, and I didn't use it very much until 2011/12. But I do have some old photos of me on there - and by old, I mean photos when I was about 15. Some of them have gone since the friend who uploaded tons of photos has taken them down, but it's been interesting to see not only what I used to look like, but the things I used to do and the friends I had, many of whom I've lost touch with.

It's easier than ever to take and share photos of yourself, and for all that I do roll my eyes at people who have to photograph every part of their lives - I also tend to, myself, mostly take artsy rather than personal photos - they are really fun to look back at. I'm proud of the landscape scenic photos I've taken but I also like the photos of people I know just having fun. More than anything else, they can be such a strong reminder of parts of your life that you don't think about that often.

They can be a record of who you were with at that moment...

The family mob back in 2009. At least half of us are missing.

My friend group at school on our last day, 2011.

Or of a particular event you may have forgotten...

HAHAHA so this was taken at a benefit concert we were playing at. We got slightly drunk before performing and had a whale of a time backstage.

Of the styles you used to try...

God, I used to spend so much time on my hair. This is dyed and curled with tongs!

Obviously this was not an everyday look! But I had just discovered backcombing.

The places you've been...

On top of Table Mountain in Cape Town, with Robben Island in the distance.

Rehearsal on a music project in Turkey.

Or even hold a premonition of the future in a weird sort of way...

As a seventeen-year-old on a summer school, I am standing on the quad of what, just over a year later, will be my college at Oxford.

So none of these photos are great examples of photography, and a lot of them have no real point to them - no one needed to take photos of us at the benefit concert we organised or disobeying the rules about not standing on the grass (oops...). But what they lack in skill they make up for in memories (and also cringey memories of hairstyles past!).