I exposed only one roll during our five-day trip to Mexico City, which is part of a larger ongoing conversation about my relationship to photography.
My camera is broken, I discover when I receive my scans. Fifteen images out of a roll of thirty-six come back to me. The rest are blanks. Gray blips I describe here for you, whatever ones I can still remember. These images are a lost album, the frame of the viewfinder etched only in my memory.
The clothes lines on our rooftop strung on a diagonal, the ones that remind me so viscerally about my time in Seville, the starch of the infected sheets. The evening light fades against the stucco wall behind them. A utility meter on the right of the frame. Clothes pins scattered on the tile and dotted on the lines. Kel, come on, Andrew calls me from the stairwell around the corner.
Andrew squats under fluorescent lights in the electronics store, reaching for the camera batteries that have now given me the power I’d been missing, the power to take this picture. We walked five miles that morning, a pilgrimage to shuttered camera shops and pharmacies and corner stores, searching for my CR2s with my broken Spanish. See erreh dos?
I almost drop my guava pastry as frame my outstretched hand holding the delicious goods, tote bag dangling on my arm, and I snap the shutter.
We have lunch at a restaurant located in a converted residence. The dining area is outdoors and a tree limb rises across our table. I take a photo of Andrew sniffing a Sicilian white wine in a stemmed glass. His face is in profile, his sunglasses obscure his eye line. He’s wearing his Patagonia. I order the Albarino. I think he takes a photo of me, I smirk because I feel embarrassed before a lens, maybe it’s on my camera, maybe on his, I don’t remember.
The sunlight sears the backs of my shoulders. I can feel the grill marks on my skin from my ribbed mock-neck sleeveless top (a hand-me-down from Caro). Warmth, I think, what a luxury. We approach a concrete basin surrounded by trellises blooming with purple vines. Teens kick a ball back and forth, a small child with elbow pads and knee pads rolls forward nervously on a comically large skateboard, a German Shepard mix races after a chewed up tennis ball. I snap a photo of the sunlight on the purple blooms, the bustle in the foreground and the battered concrete behind.
Our last night: we are on our rooftop again, the full moon rising from the horizon. The golden hour exposes a crew of construction workers in the far distance atop beams, framed by cranes. The men are backlit by the setting sun, shadows floating in the skyline.
