BEFORE: This Polaroid of me had deteriorated quite badly over the years, with a green colour cast and off-colour spots appearing all over the image.
Looking back on the photos that I’ve appeared in as a kid, I very rarely treasure any of them.
In fact, all of my class photos I’ve simply stowed away in an album and haven’t looked at them since they were taken -- at some point during primary school, I stopped buying them altogether.
My father, who’s an avid photographer (I picked up photography from him, in fact) shot a lot of photos of my eldest brother — Dad was understandably excited about his first-born and this manifested in an excessive number of photos of him.
When I say excessive I mean it — there are albums and albums of my brother, holding a toy gun, or sitting in a tree, or playing with animals.
By my second brother, however, the interest in shooting pictures of his kids had waned and the number of photos taken of my second brother were about half that of my eldest brother.
Of course, by the time I came along, my father had seriously lost interest in taking photos of his children, and as such there are only a handful of photos of me as a kid.
Actually, I’m fine with that — I don’t really like looking at photos of myself — I don’t wax lyrical about my childhood, happy as it was. I am the sum of my memories, and I don’t really need to look at those photos to remind myself of how it was.
However, there is one photo that out of the handful of me that I really like.
This photo was taken of me as a six-year old in 1978 in Kuala Lumpur shortly after watching Star Wars when it was first shown in Malaysian cinemas.
This photo is a Polaroid of Mini-Me standing with a bunch of dudes dressed in official Star Wars costumes at the old Jaya Supermarket, promoting Star Wars toys.
I remember many things about this photo — how ticklish Chewbacca’s hairy hand was on my ear and how much I wanted a lightsaber.
And yes, astute, younger Star Wars fans are going to point out that what has now been labelled Episode IV: A New Hope was in fact released in the United States in 1977.
Yes, that is correct but in those days, movies took a LONG time to reach our shores, and according to reliable sources older than me, the film actually arrived in Malaysia a whole year after it was shown in the United States, i.e. in 1978.
Anyway, I treasure this photo not because I’m a Star Wars fan (in fact, after Star Wars: Episodes I to III, I certainly am not a fan) but because it’s the only photo that even remotely represents the real, geeky me.
All the other photos I’ve appeared in just isn’t me — standing in a school class lineup, standing in my kindergarten uniform, sitting on a bicycle — none of those actually represented what I was interested in even then, except for this one shot.
Incidentally, I thought I’d lost this photo for years — about once a year, when I go home, I usually organise a search for it, and ask my mother about it, to which she kept insisting that I had taken it and that I had lost it.
It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, when my mother found the picture while cleaning up the spare room, that she found it again in a shoebox somewhere with a load of other photos — proving, incidentally, that I didn’t have the photo in my possession :-)
Anyway, the Polaroid had deteriorated quite badly over the years, with a green colour cast and some colour spots and required quite extensive Photoshop restoration work to fix.
Once fixed up, though I was amazed at how much detail this old Polaroid still had — I could even read the price of Magnolia ice cream in the background.
To ensure that this photo at least lasts for another twenty years, I’ve since scanned it and stored it on a cloud service and reprinted it into several 4R dye-sublimation prints.
So what photos of yourself do you treasure the most?
• Photo Kit is a fortnightly online column in which Tan Kit Hoong (bytz@thestar.com.my) shares his thoughts on the art and technology behind cameras on The Star Online.
Win a prize this Mother's Day by subscribing to our annual plan now! T&C applies.
