Thanks mum!
By Victor Evertsson
13 Jun 2009
In my last year of the 9 year grade school we have hear in Sweden there was an exhibition for art. Paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, images of any kind e.t.c. was allowed, anything with an aesthetic value. I of course submitted some photographs. The theme for the exhibition was "Environment and nature"
I did a thing involving flowers and cars, so my mother got these flowers for free by a nice gut at her work so she took the home and I tried to do something with them. So I did, it came out OK I guess. Not much to the the world of genius photographs but it's pretty clear what I want to say, at least that's what I want to believe.
A day or two later I was really bored and suddenly I found a flower from the last session in my pocket. So I looked through a drawer, you know, one of those drawers where everything is accumulated. And I found this little LED- flashlight so I took my camera and started playing around with the light and long exposures on our "worktop" in our bathroom. This was the last picture I toked before I was bored again and jumped away doing something else.
Later I looked at the pictures and somehow liked how the last one came out, naturally my mother also saw it and wanted it printed to have on the wall or something... ugh' couldn't do much about that. I'm, like most persons under 18 in our society, powerless against my parents. So this picture was printed at the same time as my other submissions to the exhibition was. I collected the pictures from the lab on the same day or the day before the deadline for handing the submissions in, so in the stress of all the school-work that had to be finished and the stress to actually make it before the deadline I forgot to remove this one which was for my mother and handed it in as well.
In the exhibition there's a jury who's task is to decide which art-work that should get a small symbolic scholarship. And luckily they liked my pictures, especially this one so I got the scholarship. I remember the day before the exhibition, after yet another day of hard school work I fell asleep early. I remember hearing the phone ringing and my mother answering it and laugh and talk loudly and jolly with the one in the phone, and then fall asleep again. Somewhere in the foggy mind of a sleeping brain I heard my mother come into my room telling me I've got the scholarship. Naturally, I did like any sleeping teen would have done, I kept on sleeping. The morning after this I woke up remembering what I thought was a dream, I mentioned that to my mother and she said it wasn't a dream. Euphoria.
A few months later when I was finished with grade school and had just started my first year at upper secondary school I got a letter, an invitation from our small art society, the society who held the exhibition. In the letter there was a time and place. Well there at the given time and place I couldn't imagine how many people that were there, since I'm Swedish by nature I am a little shy so this was a really big thing for me. After a small ceremony I got a nice diploma and an envelope with the small scholarship money in it and of course it was time for every photographers nightmare, time for a picture of the lucky one. "Drop the curtain!"
Apart from the scholarship also sold the printed copy of this picture it to my school since they always bought the art if there was a winning submission from the school. I also gave them the rest of the printed pictures as a "thank you".
So I earned 2000 SEK, which is somewhere around 250 USD or 150 GBP on a picture I took really bored and wasn't going to submit at all. Now that money is gone but I remember what I did with a part of them. I ordered another print for my mother, as a "thank you! to her too, if it wasn't for her I would not have had this experience at all. Thanks mum!
A lucky shot is the least you can say. It's a simple shot that I luckily got to show to many people and also the first picture I got sold. A very funny and good experience for me as a 15 year old and it still is.
1 response
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maghin said (2 Jul 2009):
nice story Victor. congratulations!
