Welcome back to our newest addition to the Impossible Blog: Impossible’s Analog Travelog! In this series, we’ll be showcasing fantastic Impossible photos taken on voyages the world over. This entry comes from The Gentleman Amateur, who recently visited Greece and brought along some Impossible film…
1: We started our trip round Greece in Athens, in the Acropolis Museum.
2: When I think of Greece, I think of ancient times, classical civilisation; things that have survived for thousands of years, and still have the power to stop us in our tracks.
3: From the museum, you can look out the window, and see the Acropolis right there on top of the hill, up above the city that’s grown around it. And if you listen very carefully, maybe you can still hear the voices of the gods raining down from the sky.
4: But that’s not the experience of most people in Greece today. The news is all about the Eurozone crisis: about economic and political changes so severe they’re ripping people’s lives to pieces, about riots and flames and the end of the world as we know it.
5: Our Athenian friend took us to Syntagma Square, the epicentre of the riots. It was extraordinary to see all that graffiti there on those classical facades. You couldn’t help but feel that western civilisation was building up to some kind of apocalypse.
6: And yet, as our Athenian friend told us: “Even after the apocalypse, life goes on.”
7: Civilisations have come and gone, empires have risen and fallen, yet somehow, life does go on. In the tombs of Mycenae, as I shot one of my last packs of Time Zero, I wondered what would survive of our world, our civilisation.
8: Already, the world I grew up with – the real world, the analogue world, the world of material objects – is facing extinction. Newspapers, vinyl records, celluloid and film… When I was a kid, Polaroid was huge, and Kodak was even bigger! Yet look at them now.
9: But sometimes…things survive. When people decide things have value, and do whatever it takes to keep them alive, things can go on and on. On a rocky beach in Lesvos, I shot a pack of Impossible Project Color Protection film, and fell in love with the results. So thank you to Impossible, and to Greece, for reminding me that there is always hope.
About The Gentleman Amateur
He is a London-based writer and photographer. He remains committed to all things analogue, especially instant film.
Thank you to The Gentleman Amateur for taking part in Analog Travelog. His photography can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/thegentlemanamateur/.
If you’ve recently taken a trip on which you shot some Impossible photos or plan on taking one soon, please shoot us an email at usa@theimpossibleproject.com
