A momentary distraction from my usual course of crafting: I scrounged these photos up at an antique/junk store in Fremont, from a little tabletop rack where they were all mashed in together. From left to right: soldier, WW2, presumably in Europe. There were a whole bunch of these there, single photos and groups of guys with guns, all casual, all developed in the same way, so I'm assuming by the same cameraman for the same reasons. Middle: two women on bench with lunch and palm trees. I'm hazarding it was also taken in the 1940s but that's mostly because their clothes are slightly outside of my historical forte. And the shiny third one: innards of a car. There was a note on the back, it says (sic):
"32 V8 dash. 39 V8 stearing whee and the
ribbon on the gearshift is for good luck. never hit a ditch yet!"
Anyway. I got these because I've been interested in resin-casting for jewellery, etc, lately, and the idea of a lacquered picture frame that has, ta-da, pictures on it is somewhat mesmerizing.
Okay, I also got them because they were crazy cheap and I have a mild fixation with old correspondence. Casual photos count as correspondence. Lithographs, kinda sorta. Photos with notes on them? They're the very best kind... is the note just the where and what of it? Is it addressed to friend or family? Was the note written then, or twenty, thirty, fifty years later in the hopes that the grand-kids would take them out and pour over them?
Aside from the whole morbid interest in the dead that I'm displaying here, I find a strange, vaguely nostalgic finality to that stage when your (the universal your, as it were) words end up in an antiques shop. Your likeness and your words (and a few other hand-made things) are the closest things to your identity that aren't literally you. I mean, sure, you can keep that necklace/cup/trophy in the family for 300-odd years, but it picks up the flavor of other people. Those words? Yours. That picture? You, even if no one remembers who the hell you are. So by the time pieces of you are being sold for .50 a snapshot, there's an end that's been reached. You've reached the end of your arc in the course of human memory; this is the shape and weft of life. Fin.
1 comment:
I know what you mean about photographs with notes on the back. They're like time machines.
But then you can't do much crafty stuff with them, because their precious existence depends on both sides being visible. This is why I have a stack of completely rad found photos that I have no idea what to do with.
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