From the notebook, written October 8th 2022
That smile.
In Paleochora, Crete. I’m floating in the Mediterranean waves. I have no sense of time. It hits me: I can’t remember when I was this comfortable spending time with my own thoughts. There’s been so many years of chasing academic achievements, surviving pandemics, recovering. Silences, idleness has scared me.
But now. I’m here. And maybe I needed to find my way back to my own company to see: That photograph, the early August morning by the Lustre fjord, western Norway.
I got my first, hand-me-down, basic analogue compact camera when I was six. One thing that all these years of amateur photography as taught me, is that what ends up on the photograph is not only about the person being photographed. It is also about the person photographing, what they see. And about where the photographing takes place.
That morning by the fjord, being photographed by Natalia, Josh saying something out of shot that makes me laugh. This is not only a photograph of the cable-work on the green cotton dress I knit while finishing my thesis in Covid isolation.
It is also a photograph of Natalia, and of Josh. I wish I could be in Natalia’s gaze, always. In perpetual dialogue with Josh. I can’t. But I can return.
This, and the high salt content of the Mediterranean Sea, keeps me afloat.
Katja Malmborg 