YOUNG BEAUTY

It was 1987 or '88. My childhood friend and me (on the left from viewers perspective). We were just turning eighteen. It was like life was always summer and disco. I remember us being excited about our new freedom of just having passed the driving test.

One Saturday night we stuffed our car with boys, so that one of them landed on my lap on the passenger side. We laughed the whole trip. For some incomprehensible reason the bonnet suddenly folded up and for a few seconds my girlfriend couldn't see anything while driving. It was her father's handsome car, a chic old Audi GL 120 with chrome trims. Every weekend we went on pilgrimage to the large disco "Airport", where we stayed until the curfew, which for years was always rung in at four in the morning with the Frank Sinatra "New York, New York" song. It is self-evident that we were later recruited as bar girls and earned something extra.

At this "holy" place we held the rituals of seeing and being seen, where boys and girls met and waited on the dance floor. Instead of the campfire and the drums we had the light jockey and the record DJ.
The painting and the appropriate clothes were always carefully selected and the corresponding Friday evening tickle in the stomach, when it was time for the ritual again, was never missing.

Beauties we were.

You might assume that these young women were well aware of how attractive they were. That these fresh and hardly touched girls knew how to use this advantage. And although we were even shown in the shop window of our city photographer, we didn't think much of it. Like all young women, we were far too focused on our weaknesses in appearance and the supposedly eye-shining self-confidence, yes, the almost temptingly smiling lips a successful unconscious copy from television or fashion covers.

Who are we looking at? It is, of course, the photographer who met us when we were adorable sixteen years young and with whom we both did an internship at his shop downtown. We enjoyed his caring and devoted friendliness (whoever thinks otherwise is usually correct but not this time) because I actually learned the craft of photography from him. As a sign that he was serious, he gave me a fully mechanical SLR camera, a Pentax XP 1000, which I still own.

He inspired me to put my hunt through the area under a motto and took an infinite amount of time to set up the projector in the back studio and to go through slide by slide with me (often around four hundred pictures). I was taught about exposure times and camera apertures. How cozy it was there to receive an exclusive tuition while the projector was warmly humming. He was a real mentor, a private tutor.

I know, of course, that he must have enjoyed admiring our youthfulness with his aesthetic eye. I am very grateful to him, deeply, that there has not been a second of ladykillers eye which would have poisoned our friendship by a sticky approach. He was a man of honor.

It's unclear if I'm still in possession of my virginity in this photograph.

I lost it at the age of eighteen, rather unwillingly. I wrote a sad (and probably naive bad) poem about it.

Sexuality was always in the air from then on. When you're beautiful, it's easy to get in touch. You just have to let your gaze speak and sometimes not even that.

We, young women, were touched from then on with the intention that there is more to it.

I feel regret that physical attention was actually only received at the price of sex. That is a great pity and I think that young people - men and women - should be able to touch each other amicably, without people accusing them of having subliminal or open sexual intentions. How much nicer it would be if boys too could give themselves physical cordiality.

What a blessing it is to have a friend or her mother braid your hair. The silent noises of breathing and how the hair glides through your fingers, that is a feeling of comfort. Never should be disturbed.

Here you can see the unchanged original image. I'm glad I photographed it because the paper faded with time. It's been exactly thirty years since the photograph was taken.

Am I melancholic? Actually, no. Every time in my life has had its peculiar events of a challenging and loving nature.

The woman almost seems like a stranger to me, whom I hardly recognize. How can it be true that I was once young? Such a full life lies between now and then that, if I hadn't had any photographs, my memories would probably be much more fragmentary.

When you see a beautiful young person, note that you don't see them as sex objects. See the beauty in youthfulness, enjoy it.

Thank you for reading.