The Matchbook Years

Before food blogs, dropped Google Map pins, and Instagram, there were matchbooks. They emerged from a purse to light a friend’s cigarette and gave off the flash of spring in Paris, autumn in New York. They were found in a suit jacket, months after they were acquired. They were passed from hand to hand—intimate, unassuming objects from which one could discover where to go or remember where one had been.

I began collecting matchbooks when I was nine years old. During family vacations, I had my ritual: in every restaurant or hotel we entered, I would immediately locate the basket of matchbooks and reach my hand in. Every establishment had their own shape and size and color, and never knowing what I would find was part of the thrill.

Over the last 20 years, as the matchbooks sat in a closet in Panama, they absorbed the stains and scratches of humidity and sulphur, and some even outlasted the places from which they came. In a time when so many of our experiences are fleeting, these matchbooks have endured. When I hold them, I hold time. To hold them a little bit longer, I picked up my camera.