My dad keeps this box of pictures in his living room, chock full of family memories. There are black and white photos of my parents as kids, my grandparents in their younger years (check out those cat eye glasses, Grandma!), other various relatives I don’t even know…and there are faded color photos of me and my siblings riding bikes, playing baseball, trips to Disneyland, camping & fishing. And every Thanksgiving we have this ritual where me and my siblings pass around the pictures from that box and laugh and reminisce about the years gone by.
Photographs are a great and fun way to document the events of one’s life. Sometimes, though, they can serve another purpose. The anthropologist in me loves studying photos of complete strangers, if for nothing else than wiling away the time. The writer in me uses them as inspiration; they act as muse when I have writers block.
For instance, recently I found a photograph depicting a family in the 1970s, obviously celebrating a wedding. The men wore blue daisy boutonnieres on the wide lapels of their melon colored tuxes, which had elephant trunk pants to match. One man in the photo (obviously not a member of the wedding party) wore a brown pant suit that matched his brown Grizzly Adams beard. Another man (my guess is he’s the dad of either the bride or the groom…) wore high waisted white trousers, a seersucker pinstriped white blazer, a red linen shirt and a diagonally striped neck tie that barely grazed the top of his pot belly.
The women had on turquoise colored sheaths, their hair stacked high on top of their heads, ringlets like Hasidic peyos hanging from their temples. If this was a wedding, the bride and groom were conspicuously missing from the party.
To look at the photograph you just wondered how these people could be so happy in their outrageous get-ups. Its fun to speculate about the situations, figuring out their stories, wondering why the photo became “lost” in the first place.
Was it the father in the photo who recently passed away and the picture was in a dresser, which was sold at the estate sale? Did one of the bridesmaids pull out this photo from its shoebox where she had it stored for years…only to toss it because she was embarrassed by the hideous gown she agreed to wear to her friend’s wedding? Did the recent divorcee throw the photos out the window of her car as she drove away from her ex-family home…?
I don’t know what their story is, but I’ll have fun figuring it out!
Sometimes you find photographs that, when you look at them you wonder if the smiles are real. I mean, how many photos have I come across where I think, “is this a moment truly captured–or is this a staged event where some desperate mom is trying to convince the world that her dysfunctional family is truly very happy? “See,” She seems to be saying, ”The pictures tell the REAL story.” And the children’s eyes are sad. And the dad is looking the other way. And the mom has a big toothy white smile as she finger combs the hair on the head of the sad little boy…everything seemingly perfect…everything seemingly in its proper place…
Or you might find a photo that is just shocking beyond belief…and there are no words to describe the event that was documented on film. Like this one of the woman wrapping a man in toilet paper…
I like old photos. I have a few family pics dating back to the turn of the century~not sure who they are, exactly. My mom says they are her dad’s relatives. A boy of about nine or ten has this look on his face that is so funny, as if he just sucked on a lemon. But my brother says its because of the flash, the poor child was caught on film half way into a blink.
Oh my favorite lolcat! Here’s a picture of my dancing kitteh! We tried to convince her that dancing on the table is not going to get her any tips! I put this one on ICANHAZCHEEZBURGER. She’s Carmen Mirandah Kitteh. No, wait, that’s Mikal Jacko Kitteh. Or…Fred Ahstair kitteh…if only I could audition her for “So You Think You Can Dance?” I luv it!
Thanks to Al Gore and his invention, the Internet, I am able to look at other folks’ collections of found photos online! Check out how happy this “family” is! All of them with their big smiles! I just love the fur coats and the big Caddies!
Here is an interesting collection of a few shared file-found photos. My fave in this collection is the Storm Trooper parade.
For as much fun as the found photos are, I am excited to take my own. Barry just bought me a Canon EOS 650, analog SLR…just like the one I wanted in college! So far I’ve taken two rolls of film, and can’t wait to see them developed! And then, I can only dream that years from now, when we gather together with our kids for the holidays we’ll go through the boxes of our own pictures and reminisce. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry. We’ll wonder, “just what were we thinking?” And it’ll be fun.
