A memoir in images and texts by J.M. Coetzee who, before becoming one of the most significant writers of our time, had a passion for making pictures. The volume gathers the first experiments with a camera by the Nobel laureate, which came to light only recently after staying shut in a box for more than sixty years. Before becoming the writer and literary critic he is today, an attentive observer of western society and of the changes in post-apartheid South Africa, he secretly dreamed of working with a camera. In the years of his adolescence spent in Cape Town, armed with a Wega, he fixed in snapshots whatever interested him most: friends and teachers at school, sporting events, the natural surroundings or the buildings of his city, the old Karoo farm and family life at home. They are traces of domestic and private life, dating from 1955 and 1956, found only by chance.