High School Portraits: Keep in Touch and Stay Cool.

I recently came across a "Senior Year" book that was optional to buy near the end of senior year high school. It basically ask a lot of questions about us and our friends, so that we can remember part of who we were and what was going on then. There is also a lot of room for decorating it with photos, and empty slots in the back for the nicer photos that you may not want to cut up or glue.

When looking through my Senior Book, I came across a lot of individual portraits that most of us all bought our senior year (and some junior year) to give out to family and friends. A number of them had something written on the back of them. I read a good portion of them before looking at the picture or the name signed at the bottom, to see if I could remember who may of wrote that. I only knew two of them and only because of particular things they mentioned, like the college they were going to or other people we both knew.

I became fascinated with these writings and how they basically become meaningless in the end. And maybe meaningless is a harsh word, cause I know at the time they were written they meant something. But from the past 12 years I have only remained in contact with one of them, and have recently got in contact with a few more through the convenience of Facebook.

These are 10 scans of some of those writings. I erased the signed names at the bottom, along with college names and phone numbers, to make them become less about the individual writings and more about these ideas of memory being lost, friendships and contacts becoming broken, and the question of what all of that might mean to us now.