Spotless Minds

I thought about posting of this since I stumbled upon it more than a while ago on Square America , then I've forgotten it, I've re-stumbled upon it again and so on since today...

The Eternal Sunshine of Fred & Anne is one of my favorite sections of the site. Square America is full of gorgeous old pictures, like the ones of people in photobooths I've already wrote about , but with Fred and Anne is all about a bizzarre story of feelings more than beautiful images...

Their story begins when three photo albums are found in a flea market in Wisconsin. The first two albums date 1914-1920 circa and chronicle school days and college years of, respectively, a young man named Fred, from Spirit Lake, Iowa and of a girl named Anne.



The subject of these albums is typical and they are artfully put together, still there is something strange...


A lot of pictures had faces rudely and methodically cut or scratched out and they happen to be all female faces in Fred's album and male faces in Anne's album...in her case it looked like all the photos removed are of the same man, a certain "Cas from Canada".




At the end of the second album, we learn that Fred and Anne had begun dating...


Are you waiting to know what's in the third album and if they had lived happily ever after? Go here and read what happened then!

But beyond this, I'm sure you're all wondering about the same things:

"did they agree to go through their own or each other's albums and remove any photos of old flames? Did one or the other do it on their own? If so, did they do it laughingly after a few glasses of wine or bitterly after an argument? And did it acheive it's desired effect- did Fred never again think about Delia or Gladys, did Anne forget Cas? These albums remind us of how potent our relationship to photographs can be, how fully they embody and encapsulate our past. Who hasn't felt the perverse (or perhaps not so perverse) thrill of ripping up or throwing away a photo of an old lover. What's amazing about these albums is that they no longer contain a record of a former love but of the moment that love became something else, something they no longer felt they could live with."