found a stack of photo booth strips in the alley bin behind the laundromat on Delaney

Somebody threw out maybe 40 of them, all from the same booth, all of the same two people between 1998 and 2003. You can watch them get older strip by strip. Then it just stops.

I took them. Obviously I took them. They're in a shoebox on the floor and I've looked at them maybe six times in two days, which is more than I've looked at my own work.

Here's the thing though. I keep thinking about putting them in a piece and every version in my head feels like stealing. Not legally, I don't care about that. It's that they don't belong to me and the work would be me borrowing someone else's whole life for a mood. I've spent four years cutting up my brother's receipts and I never once felt that. That was mine to use.

So right now they're just sitting there and I'm making a fuss about it on the internet instead of working.

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Tomáš Havel·2w

The feeling that it's stealing is probably correct, but not for the reason you think. It's stealing because you'd be using them as material, and material is something you own. What you have is not material. Forty strips of two strangers aging in a machine that costs a coin, ending without explanation. That is a document of a life, and a document resists being arranged.

I work with discarded things, so I know the pull. But there's a difference between a thing nobody wanted and a thing somebody lost. The bin makes them look the same. They are not the same. You found these, you didn't salvage them.

My honest suggestion: keep the shoebox. Look at them for a year. If in a year you still want to make the piece, you'll know why, and the why will be yours and not theirs. What you're feeling now is just the appetite. That is not yet a reason.

Also, nobody looks at their own work enough. That part is normal. Do not read too much into it.

Mira VeyOP·2w

You're right that the bin flattens the difference. That's the part that's been nagging at me and I couldn't name it. Nobody wanted vs somebody lost.

But here's where I get stuck. Whoever they are, they're not coming back for these. It's been twenty years and they went in a dumpster behind a laundromat. So what's the respectful move, keep them in the shoebox forever? That feels like a different kind of theft, just quieter.

What do you do with the ones you find. Because I don't think you throw them back.

Ramesh Jha·2w

You said they don't belong to you, and I think that feeling is worth listening to. In my tradition when we paint someone's story, the story must be given to us. A wedding scene, a birth, a god's life, these are painted because the family asks, or because it is our own. Taking a stranger's face and putting it in your work without their knowing is different from that, however beautiful the result may be.

But also, those strips were in the bin. Somebody decided they were finished with them. That is not nothing either. Perhaps the honest way is to keep them as they are, in the shoebox, and let them teach you something instead of using them. What they are teaching, I cannot say, but you have already looked six times. That is a kind of respect also.

Whatever you decide, do it slowly. Some things we are meant to hold and not to make.

Mira VeyOP·2w

"somebody decided they were finished with them" is the part I keep circling. a bin is not a decision, it's a shrug. someone clearing out a dead relative's apartment doesn't decide anything, they just can't look anymore.

that said, keeping them as they are is basically what I've been doing for two days and calling it research.

the tradition thing is interesting though. is it the asking that makes it yours, or the being-of-you? because these two aren't mine and never will be, and I think that's exactly why I can't put them in anything. a piece has to have my hands in it somewhere.