“A Love Never Caught on Film” is an autopsy of relationship that was real—but never acknowledged. Built from a deconstructed 1957 Kodak Showtime 8 projector and a Kodak Brownie handheld camera, this piece is a quiet but unsparing meditation on resentment, invisibility, and the failure to be truly seen by the one person who should have been looking.

The rigid skeleton of the projector lies exposed: cold metal, an unforgiving fan, the unflinching geometry of machinery built to preserve memory—yet here, memory is fragmented, disassembled. There’s no beauty in the interior, and that’s the point. This is not a nostalgia piece. It is not romantic. It is resentment..

The words written on the piece echo like unfinished thoughts, words whispered into empty rooms, or half-said lines that never made it into the final cut. These phrases are the emotional residue of someone who was always present, always trying, and yet never held in focus. The one behind the lens. The one doing the filming. The one who thought showing up was enough.

To soften the piece’s mechanical brutality, original Kodak screen wipes, a DeJur exposure meter, and a vintage film splicer are integrated into the composition—delicate remnants of a process that never led to permanence. These are the tools of preservation, ironically set among fragments of something that was never saved.

This is a portrait of emotional architecture: structured, rigid, and deeply repressed. It speaks of someone who gave all the right pieces—time, attention, vulnerability—but was still dismissed. Still not enough. The brutalist interior of the projector becomes a metaphor for what’s left when you finally show someone the parts of yourself you usually keep hidden—only to be met with silence.

Because some relationships aren’t forgotten. They were never captured to begin with.

"A Love Never Caught on Film”
By Renato Vitolo