KL, already nostalgia-tinged
Photodrop: Glimpses of KL, 2015-
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
As I’ve been less practiced at using Instagram in recent years, I’ve ended up with many photos in my hard drives that will never see the light of day. So from time to time, I think I’ll drop some photos here from my messy, messy archives as I attempt to impose some order on them. Here are a smatter of snapshots of my city, Kuala Lumpur. I haven’t tried too hard to give you a full picture of all its various faces here (I’m not sure that’s even possible), but hopefully they will give you some idea of what it’s like if you’ve never been here before.
For me, looking at some of these photos is a nostalgic exercise, as some of these places no longer exist in the same way—sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. The confluence of the rivers Klang and Gombak at the steps of Masjid Jamek, for instance, looks very different today. I won’t lie, I preferred how it looked before, even if it was just deserted concrete; now you’ll get blinding lights and, inexplicably, vents pumping out “fog” in the evening until it blankets the river. But even that, I guess, speaks to a certain facet of the Malaysian character…
Until the next,
E.