Time Travel

So I’m all excited packing my photo gear for this special trip: we are on our way to Konstantin's childhood - a village in Ukraine, a place of summer refuge from the city for his grandparents and an extended gang of cousins.

Feeling the itch in my hands, clasping the camera and ready to pounce out of the car as we approach, I’m already seeing all those rich, colourful images in my head I’m about to take.

They will have an appropriate sweet dose of nostalgia - not too much, but just right to illustrate his memories, as in "here is the bump I tripped over and fell off my bike", and "this is the roof we used to climb", and "that’s where the haystack was where we had that bottle of vodka the older cousins 'procured' once", etc.

So we arrive and there is...nothingness, literally. No buildings or streets, just trees and a river. Apparently the houses got pulled apart brick by brick. A little forest claimed their territory. All consumed by nature and time in some 25 years, like it was never there - a totally surreal experience.

Bizarrely that nothingness was beautiful in its own way...there was an emptiness ringing in the air where once used to be something else - the page was turned.

That place simply no longer exists and no amount of time travel can change that. I simply wish there were photos from back then - I just so wanted to share that experience with him.

I still hear a slogan in my head from this 90’s Ukrainian TV show “Знімаймося, бо ми того варті!” - “Let’s take pictures of each other, as we are worth it”

Buzovka, September 2017