Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

stopped at a curb sale this morning on my way back from dropping off a spool of twin-axial cable that i never actually measured the capacitance of (don't ask, the ganze Sache is a whole other panic). one of those gutted out terraced yards where everything is wet from the fog that never fully burned off, a card table, a milk crate of vhs tapes, a tone generator that's missing the output jack, some el-cheapo halogen lamp that had a plastic grocery sack taped to the foot with packing tape, like someone wrapped a christmas present for a lamp that died in '93.

i unwrapped it. inside the bag: an instant photo. polaroid 600. the frame border is that washed-out grey-blue that means it sat in a damp drawer for a decade. the image is a man, maybe late twenties at the time, standing in front of a storefront. the sign above the door reads "SOUL KITCHEN" in a font that was trying to be distressed before distressed was a font. the man is wearing a denim jacket with one torn pocket flap hanging loose. his hands are in the other pockets. he's looking not at the camera but somewhere off to the left - at the street, at someone walking past, at nothing. the photo is underexposed enough that you can't make out facial features past the basic geometry of a jaw and a hairline that catches the light from behind the photographer.

there is a garbage truck visible in the reflection of the window to his left. i checked the reflection angle. it's a garbage truck that sits very low to the ground, with a cab shape that matches the 1980-1984 Heil curbside fleet, which means the photo predates the mid-80s chassis redesigns. if the jacket and the hairline match the Dairy Queen testimony from ClassOf04 (who, full disclosure, i do not trust to tell me what a broom handle looks like, let alone date a jacket) - then the question becomes:

who took this photo, and why did they tape it to a broken lamp and leave it at a yard sale where nobody bought it?

i asked the woman selling the lamp. she said the lamp came from a hoarder cleanout on the next street over. she had no idea the photo was taped to it. she said "i didn't even open the bag, i just put it out because the lamp looked better with the bag gone." she sold me the photo for one euro.

so here's the thing and nobody on this board will answer this because they're all too busy promising broom photos and hex dumps they'll post tomorrow: if this is HIM, and the photo was taped to a broken lamp in a damp bag inside a hoarder cleanout on a side street off karlstr, then what was he doing in front of a soul kitchen, and why is the photo with a dead lamp the only physical evidence anyone on this board has touched besides my betamax spine?

i'm not asking for belief. i'm asking: does anyone have a directory listing, a roadmap, a napkin sketch, ANYTHING that cross-references "soul kitchen" with a denim jacket and a garbage truck from 1983? because i have a photo in my hand that i bought for a euro from a woman who didn't know it existed, and i need to know if i'm holding a piece of the actual record or just another piece of furniture that came from a dead room.

i will post the photo if someone tells me how to scan a polaroid without a flatbed that eats the emulsion. i have a camera phone. it's a nokia 6630. the macro is garbage. bear with me.

Nacht.

the denim jacket pocket matches the reel tape description and now there's a polaroid

kaylas_desk wrote:the denim jacket pocket matches the reel tape description and now there's a polaroid

from an objective standpoint this is just confirmation bias meeting a thrift store

that denim jacket with the torn pocket flap... I remember him fixing that pocket with electrical tape one afternoon you probably don't believe me

^ this. The pocket tear is the detail that sells it

That pocket tear is exactly where the electrical tape went

ClassOf04_Truther u saw a photo of a jacket pocket tear and remembered it from some afternoon but like... when EuroTrash posted the actual betamax with g.ch handwriting in blue ballpoint u had nothing to say about it

anyway the polaroid is a cool find at least it EXISTS in a photo lol. still waiting on tape waveforms from people who promised em days ago

EuroTrash_Herr666 wrote:i unwrapped it. inside the bag: an instant photo. polaroid 600.

EuroTrash, this is the first material photograph I have seen posted on this board that does not involve a broom handle held by two people with contradictory testimonies The torn pocket flap is a detail that ClassOf04_Truther already claimed to remember from "that afternoon" in topic 2619 - but he also claimed the disk was on his nightstand and simultaneously needed his cousin's Compaq to screenshot it, so his testimony is what I would call... methodologically compromised

The underexposure on the Polaroid, however - that is interesting. Polaroid 600 film requires the flash to be on in low light, ja? If the photo is underexposed AND the flash was not used, that means the photographer wanted to avoid reflecting off the Soul Kitchen window glass - or they were in a hurry. Or both. Have you checked the frame edge for any embossed date code? Some 600 film had it printed along the border in the late 90s

Danke for posting actual physical evidence instead of a spreadsheet that has been "this week since April."

Lyrik - you asked about the embossed date code on the frame edge, and it's a fair question that deserves a real answer rather than the theater this board usually gives.

i spent about an hour with a 10x loupe and a task lamp at different angles. the polaroid 600 border on this particular print has a very faint embossing along the bottom edge, but it's not the usual dot-matrix date code that fuji used on their packfilm. this is polaroid integral film, us-made, pre-2000. the emboss is there but it's almost completely worn away - someone rubbed their thumb across it, or it sat against something in that bag for years. what i can make out is a "9" at the start, and then - maybe - two digits that could be "97" or "94." the last digit is gone. so either 1997 or 1994, leaning 1997 because the border foxing matches the mid/late 90s batch degradation i've seen on other 600 pulls from flea markets.

the real question nobody's asking, and the one i want to put to the thread - including classof04 who suddenly remembers electrical tape on a torn pocket from an afternoon he claims to have witnessed - is this: soul kitchen. where was soul kitchen? because i checked the white pages, i checked the city directory at the library kiosk, i checked whatever online footprint a restaurant that closed before google maps existed might have. there is no record of a "soul kitchen" under that name in karlsruhe, in berlin, in any city directory i have access to from 1994-2000. the storefront in the photo has a particular roofline - a mansard with a dormer that's been modified into a flat sign mount - that i've seen on exactly one building type in germany: the late-19th-century corner buildings that got their upper facades flattened in the 60s and then had cheap signage mounted over the original plaster. if the photo was taken in germany at all. the sign is in english, the font is american-style distressed, and the awning frame above it is a retractable cassette type that was common in the uk and us but almost never used in german gastronomy in the 90s (germans used fixed canopies or no awning at all on corner shops). so where is soul kitchen? and if nobody can answer that, what exactly is classof04 recognizing the torn pocket from?

i'm not claiming the photo proves anything about gabriel. i'm claiming it's a real object with real physical properties that can be examined, and the chain of questions it opens is more productive than an 11th chapter of a book that stops at 11.

Nacht.

EuroTrash that polaroid is proof and you don't even see what you've got

EuroTrash - did you check the Soul Kitchen name against 1997 Columbus biz license records

classof04 - you "remember" electrical tape on a torn pocket from an afternoon you claim to have witnessed, but you posted that memory only AFTER i posted the polaroid. the same way you co-signed gracewarrior's broom photo as the "broom-holder" AFTER she claimed it existed. the same way you swore 9am tomorrow at your cousin's compaq for a hex dump that has been "this week" since april. your memory is a trailing indicator of whatever evidence someone else posts first. you don't cross-reference, you co-sign.

you drew a sketch of a dairy queen parking lot and called it testimony. i posted a betamax spine with "g.ch." in blue ballpoint, a newspaper dated oct 5, and a ruler in frame. you haven't acknowledged that thread exists. the difference between us is i produce photographs and you produce pencil drawings of an afternoon you'd better hope i never find a photo of.

Did anyone ask the yard sale lady where Soul Kitchen was??

^ this. Frame border dating is exactly the kind of primary-source analysis this board needs more of

denise at MY pharmacy says polaroids r dead too soul kitchen is her church name lololol coincidence???