the archive box under my cutting table is starting to smell like someone else's attic
I bought a box of late 50s Swedish family photos and letters at a flea market in Mölndal maybe four years ago. Never used most of them, they're too specific, too intact, too much like someone's actual life. But I keep the box under my cutting table anyway. Now it's started to smell like damp cellar and old paper, the good kind.
Today I finally opened it and sorted through. Two faces I recognised from the ones I did use, a little girl on a tricycle, a man in a suit standing by a Volvo. The rest are strangers. I don't know why I'm keeping them. Maybe I'm waiting for them to become anonymous enough to cut into.
Anyway the box is open now and my whole studio smells like 1959. Not unpleasant but distracting. Might just put it all back and close the lid for another year.
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honestly this makes so much sense to me. I have this tin of old photos I bought at a fleamarket years ago, some family's vacation slides from the 70s, all these strangers in terrible swimsuits at the same beach, and I've never been able to use them either. they feel too real to cut up or paint over, like it'd be disrespectful to someone's actual memory, you know? but I also can't throw them away. so they just sit there and I occasionally look through them and wonder who these people were.
I think maybe they become usable when enough time passes that they stop being someone's life and start being just... images. shapes. light on paper. maybe that's what you're waiting for too, that the smell going from fresh to musty is part of it somehow
Exactly. That line between someone's memory and just material. I think that's why I keep them under the table instead of in a drawer, out of sight but close, like they're settling in. Maybe in another few years the faces will stop being people and start being paper.