Moment in Time

LAKE MACBRIDE— Today will be a work day, but before I get to it, there is this image of a fishing trip to South Dakota from the 20th Century. Among the men in the picture are my great, great grandfather, and my great grandfather. We don’t have a lot of photos of them, and this is the only known image of my great, great grandfather. He is seated in the foreground, baiting a hook.

With the explosion of photography, there are too many images to count and assign a meaning. So many people carry cameras all the time, on devices that are more powerful computers than were imaginable during the 1990s when I secured this image by photocopying the page of the book where it was published.
We select and bring artifacts into our narratives, just as this photo is now part of this blog.

Behind every narrative, there are moments in time when they are made, and when they take on meaning. In a consumer society, we can forget where things come from, the meaning of an artifact being the fact of its collection. That someone planned the fishing trip, invited guests and made this image using technology of the era is forgotten.

We seldom see the face of the photographer, but he or she is an unseen part of the narrative, as is the technology and the people who created it. The narrative of our lives is unavoidably collaborative, with people we know and those we don’t.
It would be presumptuous to pretend otherwise.

Today, I feel the presence of so many people who have influenced, fed and nurtured me. Whether they are here or not doesn’t matter. What matters if continuing the search for truth and meaning in the world, and creating a useful narrative out of these moments in time. Something that serves a greater good than a single life on the Iowa prairie.