I found this photograph by accident. I was scrolling through my camera roll looking for some boring document I needed for an equally boring administrative task (health insurance, or something along those lines) when I was stopped in my tracks by this image.
There’s something strange about encountering an ordinary photograph years after it was taken. At the time, it wasn’t documenting anything particularly important. It was simply a moment that happened to be captured. But seeing it again, unexpectedly and with years of distance, made me think about how differently we understand an image once we know everything that came after it.
I became interested in what would happen if I took this fleeting image and reconstructed it slowly by hand. A photograph that probably took a fraction of a second to make became something I had to sit with, examine, and rebuild over many hours. In doing so, I was spending time not only with the image, but with that particular version of my friend, and, inevitably, the version of myself who was there with her.