Lola and I have been friends for more than 10 years. She is like a sister to me. I have not seen Lola in over a year. No one I know has. She is missing. I am not sure if she is dead or alive. The last place I know she was alive in was in Hong Kong. She was working as a ‘mistress’ in an escort bar. In her last e-mail to me she said she had gotten back into drugs but could handle it.

Lola and I traveled all over the world together. Lola quickly got fixed on the idea that living somewhere else, always being on the move was making her free.

Lola was great at pretending to be something she was not. Most of the people around her did not know this other side of her. I saw her several times through rehab. And then relapse.

It was always the same, Lola’s mother and I on the phone, trying to figure out what to do, how to bring her back home and then me packing my bags and flying somewhere to look for Lola. I found her in various cities selling her body in order to feed her habit.

I don’t talk much about Lola. I am always scared that people will judge her when I tell them that she works as a prostitute and has an addiction to heroin.

As I have not had a way to communicate with Lola for so long, I started to compile pictures and I turned them into a project using images from my archive. Working with an archive is however not always easy. Philip Monk said, “using the archive for public use always makes it a fiction”. You can only show so much, and you will always be recreating a reality that is selective. The boundaries between reality and the creation of reality become sometimes blurred in the process of telling a story. I could have told the story about Lola in a different way. Photography is so powerful in that respect; it can aid the memory or shine through a lie.