Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

A dangerous french guy: pipe smoker, pork/cheese eater, wine drinker, car lover... According to the studies, I should already be dead. So I enjoy life flickr.com/photos/amelien/ Joined January 2008

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Thomas Hawk @thomashawk

a month ago

I bought a box of slides and photographs through an online auction with a Los Angeles auction house. Most boxes are birthdays and station wagons. This one was not. The first frame I held up to the light was a young woman from about 1970. Blonde. Still. The kind of face that stops a scan. A touch of the Mona Lisa, perhaps? Not Twiggy. Closer to Nico if Nico had been from Helsinki and still knew how to look happy. High northern bones. A professional light on her, even when the picture was supposed to be ordinary. I kept going. There were hundreds. Her name was Sirkka Sopanen. Later Sirkka Kyllikki Shayan-Arani. Born June 1950. Finnish. She came through the modeling world young, then she got out of it. I am not sure why. She had a husband. She wrote books. She illustrated. She designed. I found an old Twitter account she left behind. She still called Finland the beautiful country of her youth. She published a memoir in 2006 with a title that gives the whole plot away: Sirkka metropolien mallisirkuksessa. Sirkka in the model circus of the big cities. I found it online. Out of stock. Even if I could get a copy I would not be able to read it. It is in Finnish. She did not stay in that circus long. The pictures make you wish she had, and also glad she didn’t. A little boy is in a lot of the pictures. Same kid, year after year, growing up in the frames the way kids do when nobody is performing for history. I think I found him on Instagram. Grown. An actor in Los Angeles. Instagram will not let you message someone unless they follow you, and he does not follow me. Most of his photographs were locked. I found one that was not and left a comment asking him to get in touch. Maybe he will see it and reach out. Maybe not. I am an outsider who bought a box. I do not even know how he would feel about the collection turning up this way. A few people on Flickr have written that they knew her. I eventually learned she had died. December 11, 2021. There is a memorial plaque at Hollywood Forever. I went. I photographed it. I stood there for a minute with a woman I only knew from color film. That is the strange part of this work. You buy a box because the color is good. Then you end up in a cemetery paying respects to someone who never asked you to find her. I have published hundreds of the pictures in this collection now. I still have hundreds I am working on. Perhaps you knew her. If so I would love to learn more. Perhaps you know the son she left behind and can share this post with him somehow. Hopefully it would be something he would be happy to see. The collection is here: flickr.com/photos/thomash…

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Thomas Hawk @thomashawk

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Pascal Laurent @Pascal_Laurent_

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

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Amélien 🇫🇷 @amelien

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