V E B A H O O D

Montréal, 2009 © Velibor Božović

My memory doesn’t serve me well. But, when looking over my contact sheets I can almost always recall the situation when I made the exposure, even if it’d happened years ago.

Few days ago I developed a few rolls of film that I shot earlier this year. The image above was a lonely one in the middle of the contact sheet and I can’t remember anything about it. Nothing prior or after this image gives any clues, as if a ghost photographer accompanied me on that day.

No image © by Velibor Božović

It’s been a terribly long time since I traveled away from home without bringing my camera(s) and photographing everything that caught my eye. Not that there is everything wrong with taking photographs while traveling, it’s what I do with passion, but it seems I had to rediscover the feeling of looking at the world with my own eyes rather then framing it through the viewfinder.

This summer my family made two trips and I routinely packed my equipment, only upon return to realize I did not make a single frame, not even once I pulled my camera from the bag and carried it with me. During our walks my hands were free to rest in my pockets, or around my wife’s shoulder, or my children’s. My eyes were busy as always, but the range was infinite, the frame size was as big as my field of vision. There is no film or pixels, only the memory and when it dies, it is gone forever.

Here is the one of the first posts, I made on my old Vebahood blog back in 2006… I am re-posting it here because a few days ago I received this comment from Maxime (so almost 3 years after I had made the original post). It is a very interesting story, and I still can’t grasp the sometimes amazing reach of these little snippets on my obscure blog; just like with ‘Radlje ob Dravi’ they reach people that have something to say (much more than me actually, I just take photographs) about the subject… Well, this time, thanks Maxime!

Here it is:

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Montréal, 2006 © Velibor Božović

September 2006, Montreal.
While walking to the metro station, just a couple of blocks away from my home, I noticed this sticker on the traffic sign. Ever since, when taking the same route, I never fail to raise my head and check if the sticker is still there. There is suddenly a connection with this wicked thing and seems as if I’m afraid to lose it.

Comment I received 3 years later:

Monday, May 25, 2009

Maxime has left a new comment on your post “‘Emotions Are Dead’“:

Hi there…
Like a Blast from the Past,
a friend sent me the link to this pic. You might find this quite funny, but believe it or not,
I made this sticker

Yes indeed, we (the band) printed about 100 of those. That must be one of the most famous by now : )
héhéhé

Emotions Are Dead was the name of screamo-hardcore band back in 2001.

We started the band after a friend of ours past away after one those amasing, hard to forget, party at some friends house. Around 4am, back at his house, the car was left running in the garage.
Friends found him on the morning.

A month later, three guys started playing a song in rememberance of Jason Duquette. Back in Fernie, B-C, where i was spending the remains of my high-school’s over era, i once received a VHS. On it, all my friends… partying… and then, there was them, playin’ the song. They only had that one song. And no one to sing on it. So I wrote the lyrics while listening to the tape over and over again, and suggested it for them to sing on.

A few months later, i decided to fly back to Montreal. I had enough of that Go-West-Young-Boy thing. And than i started playing in that not-really-punk, not-really-rock band. We had a second guitarist as well. And we started playing That song. And then we wrote a bunch more. And then we became ‘Emotions Are Dead’ … slighty named after Juliana Theory’s ”Emotion is dead” album.

We lasted about year. That was the year ”Thursday” came out, and also the year ”Grade” broke up. There two of our most influencal band at the time.

We made stickers, tshirts, played in bars and mostly in a lot of party. We really had a blast.

Now it’s really fun to see that sticker hanging on the corner of a street, on a one-way sign, like it was sayin’: Life is Short Man, better live it good, Cause there’s no tomorrow, there’s no turning back.