In a fascinating post (Saturday, May 30th), Dominic Rivron presented a picture of himself in early youth and accompanied it with roughly 200 words describing in the present tense the circumstances, specific and contextual, of the photograph.
Wary of the somewhat viral nature of the ascribed meme, he offered the format to all who might feel ready to produce appropriately embarrassing photos from their own archives. I have hundreds. Here’s one.
Wary of the somewhat viral nature of the ascribed meme, he offered the format to all who might feel ready to produce appropriately embarrassing photos from their own archives. I have hundreds. Here’s one.
The scene is in the Ballroom at Wennington School, a mixed boarding school of ‘alternative’ persuasion near Wetherby in Yorkshire. The year is 1962. It’s late Sunday afternoon. Adam (right) is wearing a fur-collared donkey jacket. I am wearing a duffle coat and my weekend beatnik jumper. Adam is 15, I am 16. In the background are our respective girlfriends, Liz and Lindsay. Adam and I each dangle artfully from our lips an Embassy Filter cigarette. Adam is poised to strike a match. As soon as the picture is taken, cigarettes and matches are returned to their respective containers.
Adam and I spend the morning of the interminable day sat either side of our dorm window. It overlooks the side door of the main school building through which a constant traffic of students and teachers passes. For us it is the window of the tiny flat overlooking the junction of Buck Street and Camden High Street in North London where Adam lives with his mother. All the passers-by are poets, drug dealers, teenage whores and jazz musicians and each has a story to be told.
In the early afternoon we work on our huge junk sculpture of Christ Crucified, fashioned from discarded wire boot lockers, a Morris 10 car bonnet, several 5-gallon petrol canisters, some steel wall-bracing rods, assorted nuts and bolts and a bale of fence wire.
The sculpture is never completed. Three weeks after the photo is taken Adam slips out of school just before wake-up bell at 7.00 and, with fellow local authority placement Yvonne, he hitchhikes the 200 miles down the A1 to London and disappears without trace into his beloved Camden Town.
Adam and I spend the morning of the interminable day sat either side of our dorm window. It overlooks the side door of the main school building through which a constant traffic of students and teachers passes. For us it is the window of the tiny flat overlooking the junction of Buck Street and Camden High Street in North London where Adam lives with his mother. All the passers-by are poets, drug dealers, teenage whores and jazz musicians and each has a story to be told.
In the early afternoon we work on our huge junk sculpture of Christ Crucified, fashioned from discarded wire boot lockers, a Morris 10 car bonnet, several 5-gallon petrol canisters, some steel wall-bracing rods, assorted nuts and bolts and a bale of fence wire.
The sculpture is never completed. Three weeks after the photo is taken Adam slips out of school just before wake-up bell at 7.00 and, with fellow local authority placement Yvonne, he hitchhikes the 200 miles down the A1 to London and disappears without trace into his beloved Camden Town.
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