Old Photos
Feb. 23rd, 2023 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloWe got the old photographs out. Everyone likes to look at old photographs. I'd like to think I didn't but obviously I do. And when I say old I mean old. There are cartes de visite in the mix that go far back into the 19th century.
I have become their custodian. Their interpreter. I know who most of the people are and how they were related. But at this stage of the game who cares?
Ivy breezes through them. "Random old person...random child...looks like a serial killer."
Is it my eyes that are going (well, they are but not that badly) or were the snapshots from the 1930s always so hard to decipher?
Why do we keep the pictures of girl guide camps my mother attended in her teens? Who were these people? what else did they do with their lives? Would they have been surprised to learn that we were still glancing at their grey, blurry likenesses 90 years later?
There are rather a lot of pictures of myself as a baby. This is long enough ago now that they too are grey and blurry.
Something my mother said in her extreme old age: "You were a nice little boy". Really? I don't remember...
I was three or four. I was in love with Valerie Day. A surviving image shows us "fishing" with makeshift rods in a shallow puddle in the back yard. How long did we keep that up before we realised the futility of it? Was it our idea or my mother's idea for a photo-op?
Alice took a few pictures home with her. The fewer I have to be responsible for the happier I'll be. Some pictures of her granny, some pictures of her own childhood.
Suddenly we're in colour.
And now we're on a cloud.
I have stopped taking pictures of people. I don't want to trap them in random posed moments. Photos don't exactly lie but they do misrepresent. They do trivialise...
I have become their custodian. Their interpreter. I know who most of the people are and how they were related. But at this stage of the game who cares?
Ivy breezes through them. "Random old person...random child...looks like a serial killer."
Is it my eyes that are going (well, they are but not that badly) or were the snapshots from the 1930s always so hard to decipher?
Why do we keep the pictures of girl guide camps my mother attended in her teens? Who were these people? what else did they do with their lives? Would they have been surprised to learn that we were still glancing at their grey, blurry likenesses 90 years later?
There are rather a lot of pictures of myself as a baby. This is long enough ago now that they too are grey and blurry.
Something my mother said in her extreme old age: "You were a nice little boy". Really? I don't remember...
I was three or four. I was in love with Valerie Day. A surviving image shows us "fishing" with makeshift rods in a shallow puddle in the back yard. How long did we keep that up before we realised the futility of it? Was it our idea or my mother's idea for a photo-op?
Alice took a few pictures home with her. The fewer I have to be responsible for the happier I'll be. Some pictures of her granny, some pictures of her own childhood.
Suddenly we're in colour.
And now we're on a cloud.
I have stopped taking pictures of people. I don't want to trap them in random posed moments. Photos don't exactly lie but they do misrepresent. They do trivialise...
