It felt like progress as I went through the prints laid out on a table from one shoe box of photographs. I bought some 4.25 x 6.25-inch brown envelopes into which I duly sorted the prints and labeled with the contents. Since prints are scattered all over the house, this should make it a). easier to find a home for loose ones, and b). enable whoever inherits the collection to move quickly through them with a clue as to what they are about. I even managed to pick a few to shred because the images were repetitive or hard for me to know what they were. There were six of those. That’s not many given the scope of the project yet it was a big, personal step. I ran right over to the shredder so there would be no going back.
The photo above was taken when in 1979, friends with whom I worked at a department store in high school visited me in Mainz, Germany. They had married while I was overseas. We drove a rental car around France, stopping whenever and wherever it suited us. We visited a number of cathedrals, including Reims and Amiens, as well as Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel, Belle-Île-en-Mer, Bordeaux, San Sebastián, Lourdes, Carcassone, and then traveled along the Mediterranean coast to Italy. We crossed the Swiss Alps from Italy and headed back home to Mainz. The two weeks were filled completely and passed quickly.
Hard to say where this sign was located. Somewhere on the Mediterranean Coast. The places we went on the coast were not very touristy. That was one of the ideas that energized the trip. We found our own path and the trip was better for it. We went places where an American Visa card was a novelty and the clerk had to contact someone to make sure it was legit.
I shot two or three rolls of film on my Minolta SRT-101 camera. The highlight of the trip was in Saint-Paul-de-Vence where we overnighted in a small hotel. The artist Joan Miró was in residence at the nearby Fondation Maeght where he was making a film for French television. It was interesting to see the director coaching the artist about how to move for the camera. We toured the gallery and bought posters of the show to remember it by. I framed and still have mine. Alas, no photos of the artist as it wasn’t allowed.
As an organizing principle, putting photos taken on a specific trip together is conventional. None of them found their way into an album, although the makings of one was there. In retrospect, It is hard to believe I could get two weeks away from work as a military officer. Images like this one help me remember how close I was to my small group of high school friends. Isn’t that one of the purposes of photography?
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