Tights!
How Catholic School PTSD turned into a photographic subject
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Part of my school uniform was that we had to wear tights every day. We were allowed to layer same-colored socks over them in the winter, which somehow managed to emphasize the indignity of the whole arrangement. It was pure tyranny.
The itchy compression, the sagging at the knees and ankles over my gangly teenage legs, the ritual of peeling them off the second I got home. Not one of these sensory overloads have left me. To this day I don’t fully understand tights. They exist inside a liminal category of clothing that feels imposed over chosen.
The technology of them has improved, some claiming not to to rip or run. I even caved and bought a pair. So far, so good. However, this does not assuage the utter confusion they cause in me.
Taciturnly, I wear them as needed if I must - but this is purely tactical. Yet I spend most of my sartorial life avoiding tights and their equivalents, or at least, actively in search of a workaround. But somewhere along the line, they became less of a garment and more of a memory - one I assumed I had long outgrown.
Fast forward to the 2020’s; I was resuming my post-pandemic photography life. Circumstances in recent years have afforded me more time and intentionality to reshape my street practice. I’ve been reconnecting with the part of me that has always been (or wished i was) a street photographer. When asked if I am one, I reply “I am in my heart.” The rhythm of wandering, observing, chasing curiosities, all started boomeranging back.
Then I noticed it. Those freaking tights started appearing in my pictures.
What I thought was a recurring visual motif turned out to be something closer to muscle memory. Like a metal lunch box.
Insidiously, they started appearing again, but this time it was personal because they appeared in my work. How I tried to avoid it. But alas, the writing was on the wall — or in this case, on the legs. I was looking at a part of myself I had long since forgotten.
Initially, I dismissed it as coincidence, any incidental detail can be repeated often enough to feel meaningful, after all.
My brain’s emotional command center had reared its ugly head. Somewhere between observation and obsession, the images stopped feeling less accidental and more inevitable. Maybe that’s the thing about memory: it never really disappears. It just waits for the right visual trigger. At a certain point, I stopped photographing tights and started photographing whatever they were attached to in me.
They appear to be worn nowadays in a gorgeous mixture of lack-of-choice and total freedom, an irony which is not lost upon me. It represents humanity to the hilt.
And maybe that’s why I keep noticing them — not as relics of my own history, but as quiet markers of other people’s negotiations with the world. Control v comfort, performance v practicality, all folded into something as unremarkable as hosiery.
What unsettles me isn’t the item itself. What began as accidental documentation turned into projection. It was clear; the memory was looking back at me.
Tights have crept their way back into my amygdala. I suppose this is what happens when we explore the things we think we’ve outgrown. Even those that seem to be the most meaningless. Turns out, nothing ever stays fully repressed. Its just the lighting that changes.
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"(...) a gorgeous mixture of lack-of-choice and total freedom, an irony which is not lost upon me. It represents humanity to the hilt."
Beautifully written.
I spent a few childhood years growing up and going to school in Germany. I can still remember, aged about 11, going off to school on a bitterly cold winter's day wearing a pair of woolly tights under my trousers, completely terrified that one of my school friends would spot them. Tights were definitely not supposed to be worn by boys, but they really were wonderfully warm :)