I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In college, my friends and I took up photography.

We were prone to taking pictures in black and white.

It felt like a very hip thing,

especially for those of us who considered ourselves burgeoning artie types.

We purchased 35-millimeter cameras and walked the city, searching for anything

visually interesting. We snapped skyscrapers, fire hydrants, people at city bus stops. Mostly,

we snapped each other. I recently unearthed pictures from those years. There's one of my

college roommate, Monique, sitting in an IKEA chair, a Keith Herring Free South Africa poster

in the background. There's another of my friends, Darrell and Mike, standing next to each other, yet facing opposite directions.

Mike's shoulders are near his ears, his hands in his pocket.

They had just met.

I noticed the awkwardness in their bodies.

That's so Darrell.

He is stylish, dressed as cool as the first day I met him in

the high school. I so wanted his swagger. I can tell in one, graffiti tagged beneath an underpass

near the schoolkill river, I was going for a social realist vibe. I eventually switched to color film, hung a drop

cloth in my apartment, set the timer, then ran to jump into the frame. I shot myself. It's disconcerting

seeing the younger me all these years later. I noticed the sensitive, mildly insecure yet intellectually hungry me.

I was trying to see a hidden world through the camera's lens, my inner life in concert with

the world around me.

These pictures reveal how I strain to feel worthy. Time has cloaked that younger me

...