Old Photos

On the way home from the Deer Isle trip a few weeks ago, Tracey and I stopped at a roadside Flea Market to look around. I found a small snack bag filled with 1.5"X2.5" snapshots from what looks like the early 1920s. They were a mix of photos of some European places (seemingly Italy) and a few from the top of the Empire State Bldg. but this photo urged me to purchase the whole bunch...


(scanned, cleaned up and dropped on black for clarity)

How many such snapshots must have been made of this Awe-some sight by tourist and Ellis Island bound immigrant alike since the Statue of the Goddess Liberty was dedicated in 1886 (a mere two years before 'The Kodak #1' gave birth to amateur photography itself)? It still never fails to inspire, even as a quickly shot snap.

Old photos have that magic about them. So often I hear folks say, "Well, my photos aren't any good. I throw most of them out." That is a shame. While professional portraits are a nice thing to have as well, I think that everyone should make (and print!*) as many photos of their every day lives as they can. More especially of the people and places that they care about. One, for their own enjoyment years down the road when those people and places may not be around any longer, and two, for posterity to enjoy and learn from those same lost people and places.

One of my favourite books of photography is the 12 volume set of Burton Holmes' Travelogues that I found in great condition at an old book shop a few years ago. Burton Holmes traveled the world with a camera in the late 1800s and early 1900s and provided a window into the rest of the world that at the time, was the only glimpse of another culture that most people would ever get. Today, these Travelogues (he coined the phrase) serve as one of the best documentary looks at a world that could not fathom global conflict (much less two of them in such short time) that would destroy so much of the natural beauty and the wondrously executed works of man that then existed with the ruthless hands of ignorance and war.

'Fine photographic art' has its place of course, but there is plenty of room in future history for snapshots as well. The moments fly by as the speed of time and if they aren't recorded, they are left only to the fading prospective memories of the few people who may have been witness to them and have been paying attention.

(*does no good to make lots of cool digital snapshots and not print them...committing an image to print gives it a chance of survival to be seen by future generations...keeping it ONLY in a temporary electronic form, almost certainly dooms it to being lost as technologies change and CDs and hard drives are corrupted with the ravages of heat, moisture and time.)