Amélie

I love the film Amélie, and when thinking about passport photography, I immediately thought of one of the characters in the film. Nino collects torn up photo-booth photos from bins/around the booths and sticks them into an album, like a strange, eclectic family album.
Around 40 minutes into the film is when Amélie first comes across Nino, scraping under a booth for photo parts. His photo album ends up in the hands of Amélie, and it is then that we get to see exactly what his collection entails. The album in the film is something I’ve always been fascinated with, and would love to flick through it, studying all the pictures. It’s a very physical thing to look through a photo album.






The bottom photograph is a still from the film. All of the photographs are ripped up ‘jigsaws’, carefully reassembled with care in the album. With each of the photos is written the date it was found, for example the bottom left picture in the top photo states: “18 avril 1995, Louvre” – it was found 18th April 1995, either in the Louvre gallery or one of the Metro stations closest to the museum (Louvre Rivoli or Royal Musée de Louvre) [http://parisbytrain.com/closest-metro-stations-to-louvre-museum/]
The photos that Nino collects in the film have been thrown away by someone else – the person within the photo has regarded them as rubbish, whereas Nino regards them as a treasure, and something worth collecting. This is one of the reasons that the album is so intriguing in my eyes – the people within the photos are unknown to the viewer, and also the collector.
Displaying photographs in a book like this, which is almost like a scrapbook, and isn’t necessarily neat, would be a hands-on experience for the viewer.