This Photo Diary is Reflecting on Being 14

Words and Photos: Dora Sahbazovic 

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In June 2016, I bought my first analog camera. I spent that long summer capturing something only hindsight could later make clear: what it was like to be 14. 

I liked having my friends pose for me. As if by providence, none of us were good at any of this. My references were fleeting, my technique was unrefined, and my friends were bad actors. There was no intended audience. I had a hunch I was witnessing something that would never occur again. These were the last months before most things had ever even happened to any of us.

What I see in these pictures is not a regard for what is to come. The world kept on emerging and we were not afraid. I spent afternoons smoking on the roof of an abandoned house. I did a 70 kilometre pilgrimage one day for no apparent reason. I abandoned my piano practice and started sneaking out to rock concerts at night, although my parents never did forbid me to go. I did a stick and poke on my thigh and three nights later confessed to my mom, sobbing. I bleached my hair yellow and then dyed it black. I was too shy to have ever kissed a boy. We were all distraught, inquisitive, exponential. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

What I see in these pictures now is a certain shock of recollection, of a new capacity to look back and establish a unilinear narrative. 14 is about the first time one starts thinking of their life in review. This is a point of no return, and it is debilitating, and grandiose, and if we were to trust my subjects, sad. This is what my friends relayed so beautifully, and with such ease, thanks in part to the pretense of an act. 

“If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.”  says Antonin Artaud in Le théâtre et son double. I agree.

The last of this cycle was taken about this time, 10 years ago. Late September, in Zagreb, an impression started to form of how all this was supposed to be done. We’d shot and preserved the brink of the eternal consideration. Then it was fall.