A Blurred Journey – Through Nikon EM and Holga Lens

A day in December 2011, Boston, Massachusetts. It was a cold, snowy day.

But nothing felt colder than the heart of a young man lost after a series of failures.

I had just graduated with a Master’s degree, but there was no joy in it. It drained all my savings, and the weight of uncertainty hung over me. I had less than two months left to find an employer who could meet the strict requirements to sponsor my H1B visa, a search that felt more hopeless with each passing day. To make things worse, my ex girlfriend had ended a seven-year relationship. We’d been apart for over three years, and any hope of being together again had faded. For the last three years, I had been alone. But since then, I was completely lonely.

It was time to make a hard decision. A friend’s relative’s son’s acquaintance mentioned an opportunity in Florida, a lead as vague as it was desperate. The eighty-four-year-old boss behind it all was rumored to have close ties to some gangster business. And his assistant, with her sugar-sweet voice, told me they’d only discuss an offer if I could be at their office in three days and start work immediately. No questions were allowed prior to that.

A hopeless hope is still a hope, I thought.

Everything I could bring with me was packed into my ten-year-old Oldsmobile Aurora overnight. The small sedan had all sorts of stuff on its rear seat, front passenger seat, and even the center console piled all the way to the ceiling.

When I realized it the next morning, most of my cameras, including film and digital SLRs from Nikon and Minolta along with valuable lenses, were already packed somewhere in the big pile inside my car. The only camera I could find in the near-empty apartment was a cheap Nikon EM with an even cheaper Holga HL-N 60mm f/8, a plastic toy I bought just for its cute look. I had never shot a roll since getting it secondhand from eBay. I didn’t even know if I could get the correct exposure from this fully automatic setup, as I’d been using manual-only exposure for years. Worse, composition was nearly impossible. The Nikon EM’s pathetic viewfinder was small and dim, and with a fixed f/8 lens that created almost completely black vignettes, only the very center was visible. I wouldn’t even call it a point-and-shooter. It was more like a spray-and-pray.

Everything was unpredictable, the shots, and the journey.

Thirteen and a half years later, when I looked back at these photos with my wife in our cozy little house in a slow, remote town in Tasmania, I realized those blurs and vignettes perfectly captured how I felt back then. It was lonely, it was anxious, and, to some extent, it was weirdly thrilling. These shots bridge the gap between the “me” now and the “me” from thirteen and a half years ago, someone who had no idea what lay ahead in the years to come. Those moments, like the pictures themselves, remain blurred, never quite making sense but always there, as a small part of my life.

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