Old Photos
Some how I have managed to be the sibling who has ended up with the six-drawer box filled with the color transparencies that my Dad took in the 1950s and 1960s. I am having them transfered over to digital format. The first 400 images got delivered today. I am being pulled into those images with a combination of nostalgia and horror, fascination and disgust. The things in the background can be as interesting as the people in the foreground.
Some of these images are things that I have spent my entire life seeing. Most of these images are things that I have no memory of ever having seen before. My Dad traveled a lot. He tended to see road-side disasters. An sports car in the ditch, its occupants being cared for along side. Images of tornado damage to buildings. A wrecked farm truck with its load of watermelons spilled out on the road.
I was one of 5 children. There are lots of pictures of us as children. Pictures of my mother, her face never the same from one picture to another. Pictures of my dead brother. Pictures of lots of now-dead people.
Oil field pictures. Buildings. Landscapes taken through the windows of airplanes.
Some of the pictures are just good art. There is a picture of a half-finished meal in a restaurant in some European hotel that is almost a watercolor. If people asked my Dad what did he do for a living, he liked to tell them that the took photographs. It wasn't what he did to make money. But, he did take good pictures.
Some of these images are things that I have spent my entire life seeing. Most of these images are things that I have no memory of ever having seen before. My Dad traveled a lot. He tended to see road-side disasters. An sports car in the ditch, its occupants being cared for along side. Images of tornado damage to buildings. A wrecked farm truck with its load of watermelons spilled out on the road.
I was one of 5 children. There are lots of pictures of us as children. Pictures of my mother, her face never the same from one picture to another. Pictures of my dead brother. Pictures of lots of now-dead people.
Oil field pictures. Buildings. Landscapes taken through the windows of airplanes.
Some of the pictures are just good art. There is a picture of a half-finished meal in a restaurant in some European hotel that is almost a watercolor. If people asked my Dad what did he do for a living, he liked to tell them that the took photographs. It wasn't what he did to make money. But, he did take good pictures.