Ines Costa

ines — best friend writing. i have been picking up your rolls at senhor jorge's for two and a half years. you owe me forty-three euros in development fees (i have, as you know, kept a list). i am not, for your seventeenth, going to ask for it. happy birthday, ines. the contact sheet is yours. the song is godinho. the frame i love most of all of them is frame 04 — your mãe in the kitchen. obviously.

ines — rui, namorado, frame 02. i took that one on the balcony at my parents' place in alfama on the friday in september. it was the last twenty minutes of the day. you were in the green jumper. you were eating an orange. you turned to me when i picked up your camera and you said, in that flat way you have, "rui. you do not, on any account, know how to use my camera." and then you let me use it anyway. i have, since the day i met you in março, never been more proud of a single photograph. it is yours. the camera is yours. the orange, in fairness, was also yours. feliz dezessete, ines. — r.

minha querida ines — mãe writing this on the kitchen table on rua da padaria on a wednesday afternoon, with the rice on the stove and the radio on. mariana asked me, very politely, on the doorstep last sunday, if i would write something for "a thing" she was making for your birthday. i said yes immediately. i did not, until tonight, know that it was a contact sheet. of course it is a contact sheet. of course it is. you were born at half past four on a friday morning in october, in the maternidade alfredo da costa, and the very young doctor who handed you to me said, in slightly nervous portuguese, that you had — and i quote — "very alert eyes." you have, since that morning, been looking at the world the way your father looks through a viewfinder. the photographs are how you talk to us, ines. they always were. i will not pretend to understand the difference between portra 400 and portra 800, or why one is "warmer." i understand that you love it, and i love you, and there will be açorda de bacalhau on the table on the 8th at seven, and the corner shop is, conveniently, on the way home. com todo o meu amor — mãe.

ines — tomás, the friend who moved to madrid in março and is, as mariana correctly tells you, still mad about it. i am writing this from a flat in malasaña on a tuesday night, with the windows open and the neighbours doing the thing they do at half past ten on a tuesday for reasons i still do not understand. the corner shop in madrid does develop film — i found one on calle de san vicente ferrer — but it costs nine euros and it is not, on any reading, the same. i miss you. i miss the wednesday afternoons at A Brasileira when you would pretend you were studying. i miss the saturday morning walk to senhor jorge's. i miss the way you say "claro" when you mean "obviously not." madrid is fine. lisbon is better. i am, in december, coming home for ten days. save me a saturday morning. — t.

ines — leonor, prima, porto. i bought the mju II in agosto. you told me to. it cost me, on ebay, two hundred and forty euros, which is, as my pai pointed out at sunday lunch the following weekend, "a substantial sum of money for a camera that does not, ines, have a screen." i have, since agosto, shot four rolls. the first one was, predictably, mostly unusable. the second one had three good frames. the third one had eleven good frames. the fourth one was — and i mean this with the full force of my eighteen years and a single semester of art history at the universidade do porto — the best roll of photographs i have ever made. you were right. about the camera, about the film (portra 400, always), about senhor jorge being the correct development shop (i found one on rua de cedofeita, his name is senhor alvaro, he is, on some metric i cannot articulate, less correct). seventeen, prima. parabéns. — l.

ines!! ana from the darkroom class on tuesdays. i made you a contact sheet. it is in the small kraft envelope mariana put in the wall envelope. it is twenty-four frames of the rolls i shot of you and mariana between março and agosto — at the darkroom, on the steps outside the school, at A Brasileira on the wednesday in maio when you let me come even though i am, technically, one year younger and you and mariana have a strict "no one younger" rule. i know mariana is, on principle, against the idea of a contact sheet inside a contact sheet (she said, on the phone last week, that it was "showing off"). i decided to do it anyway. you are seventeen. you should have, on your seventeenth, a contact sheet from someone in the class who actually thinks you are the best photographer in the room. you are. parabéns, ines. — ana.

minha filha — pai writing. the magazine sent me down to the darkroom on rua do alecrim on the saturday morning your friend mariana came in to print the cover frame, and she let me watch her print it. you must understand that i have, in twenty-eight years of doing this for a living, never enjoyed a print session as much as that one. she is, your mariana, a serious student of the corner shop and i am very proud of you for choosing her as your friend. you have been, since you were eleven and i first put the olympus om-1 in your hands at the kitchen table on rua da padaria, the best young photographer i know. better than i was at seventeen. better, on some afternoons, than i am now. you have, formally, my camera bag from 1993 — the brown one in the hall cupboard. it is yours from the morning of the 8th. there is, in the small zip pocket on the front, a roll of portra 400 i bought in 2011 and never shot. shoot it in october. the light will be exactly right. com orgulho e com amor — pai.

Ines — Senhora Amélia Vasconcelos here. The photography teacher at the Escola Profissional de Imagem. It is, formally, against the rules of the school for me to write to a student outside of term. I have decided, on the occasion of your seventeenth birthday and after a kind message from your friend Mariana, that I do not very much mind the rule today. I have, in eleven years of teaching the Tuesday darkroom class to students between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, had perhaps four students whose contact sheets I would describe as the work of a serious photographer. You are, at sixteen — seventeen, on the 8th — one of them. The roll you brought into the darkroom in junho, the one you shot in Cascais with the Portra 400, is the single most carefully exposed roll of film by any student in this school this year. The third frame, of the gentleman fishing, will be on the wall at the end-of-year exhibition in dezembro. I have, with the permission of the school, already had it printed. Muitos parabéns, Ines. Continue, please, to ignore the part of the syllabus that suggests you should use a tripod. — Amélia Vasconcelos, Escola Profissional de Imagem