what remains when the tin is empty
photographs, memory, and the quiet work of keeping what is already gone
green. yellow. red. purple. faded but still vibrant, placed with precision. the angles are correct. the colors are distributed just so. someone has taken the time to arrange them, to maintain their balance, to keep them in order. it is a perfect system. or at least, it was.
pentax k1000 / cyberpunk 640t
these tins once held something. not just tea. something warm, something fragrant, something poured and shared and sipped in hushed conversations at kitchen tables and dimly lit diners, in places where people once sat long enough to let the steam rise between them. but not anymore. their contents have long since been steeped and swallowed, absorbed into afternoons that no longer exist. the scent, once rich and complex, is nothing more than a memory clinging to the metal. and yet, they remain.
someone has decided that they are still worth keeping, still worth stacking, still worth arranging as if their function has not already expired. this is what we do. we collect. we document. we preserve. the shape of it. the echo of its presence.
not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing.
we take photographs, not to hold onto a moment, but to hold onto the feeling that the moment mattered. we print them, store them, display them under glass. we assign them captions, timestamps, coordinates, evidence that something existed in a form we can recognize.
but photographs do not contain experience. they contain the ghost of it.
the real thing—the laughter, the scent of tea, the warmth of a late afternoon—cannot be fixed in place. it is already dissolving, even as we try to keep it still. the tins are empty, but they are still here. the photograph is printed, but the moment is gone. the system is intact, but its purpose has already expired.
entropy does not care. it is slow, patient, inevitable. even now, the glue holding these labels in place is weakening. the ink is fading. the weight is shifting. one day, a hand will reach out to adjust them, and the whole stack will tip—gracefully at first, then all at once. but not today. today, they are still standing. today, they are still being kept.
and for some reason, we are still here. standing in that antique store, hands at our sides, the silence stretching just long enough to notice. as if something might still be left inside.
see more of my work here.