An early reader of my autobiography asked about this paragraph.
When I was born, Davenport was already a tired town. I hadn’t realized it, of course, because my family life was positive and supportive. I felt I could be anything I wanted, and this notion was reinforced once I started school. I grew up in a time of hope, despite challenges. We had vague knowledge of Davenport’s beginnings. I came to believe while being from there, I was not of there. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
“I am most surprised by your statement that you did not believe you were ‘of there.’ Looking for more explanation here,” they wrote.
In response, I wrote:
My mother and father brought a defined culture with them when they moved to Davenport and I was born. I came up in that culture, which for Mother was based in rural Illinois where she was born, and for Father, it was in western Virginia. In going through the history for this book, it occurred to me that I did not experience any culture indigenous to Eastern Iowa, but rather what my parents brought with them and lived. Yes, I was from Davenport, but not a person who grew up in a culture that was local. I contrast that with Provincial France where people are a literal extension of the soil, the sea, and the air. Mine was a distinctly American experience. (Letter to a friend, Sept. 6, 2025).
When I re-write the book, which I will once its companion is finished, I plan to add this explanation. As long as we live in a consumer society where the work to produce our lives lies in places, corporations, and people with whom we have no relationship, except for a commercial transaction, we cannot be of there, much though we yearn to be.
As the garden turned from tomatoes to apples, I captured plenty of images. Here are some of them.
Last of the garden tomatoes.Collard greens.Gleaning the garden.Bur Oak tree acorns.Sunrise on the state park trail.Milkweed bugs.Sunrise on the state park trail.Red delicious apples.Tomatoes donated to the food pantry.Cold pickled hot peppers.Bowl of pears.Big salad for dinner.Wild flowers.
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?
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
It has been a week of great weather. Temperatures were in the seventies, scant rain, and plenty of sunshine. I tried to capture a bit of it for this post.
Cherry Tomatoes in the dehydrator.Morning on the trail.Wildflowers on the trail.Sunrise.Green Zebra tomato.Pre-dawn on the trail.Red Delicious apple tree in August.Mist on the lake.
Frank Shorter in the 1981 Bix 7 road race in Davenport, Iowa. He placed second. Bill Rodgers placed first. Photo by a friend using my camera while I ran the race.
When in November 1979 I returned from Germany to Iowa after serving in the U.S. Army, I was driven to continue running. The first road race I ran was seven weeks later on Jan. 2, 1980. As I finished graduate school at warp speed in May 1981 (17 months), I didn’t know what to do with myself. To use the pent up energy, I went on long distance runs and very long bicycle trips around Johnson County, sometimes both in a single day, and typically alone. In retrospect, it was a compulsion.
I hung out with some artist friends who encouraged me to be physically active. One August Saturday, we drove together to the Bix 7 road race in Davenport: I went to run the race and they accompanied me as friends sometimes do. Before I headed to the starting line, I gave them my camera to take some shots, including the one above.
In addition to Frank Shorter, they photographed the race winner, Bill Rodgers. Rodgers was just a speck on the print, hardly recognizable unless someone explained it. I favored this image where I could tell who it was. In an album somewhere I have images of myself in the crowd of runners, yet those are not kept with the ones in a box where I found this one and half a dozen others from that day.
In Part IV I wrote about orphaned photographs. What does a person do with leftover prints once the album is made? For me, I sometimes put them in an envelope with the negatives and tucked them in back of the album. Mostly, though, they get separated from the rest and placed in a box. Orphans in practice, I guess. The only thing to do with them in 2025 is label and place them in an envelope to go back in the box.
At that Bix 7 it had been a while since Frank Shorter won the 1972 Olympic gold medal in the marathon. This photograph means something in that it captured a famous person doing what he’s famous for. In 1981 it was not clear what career path might exist for a former Olympic champion. It was said at the time he entered every kind of road race he could find to further his career. I was literally there, with him.
A thing about photography is that while it can prove physical proximity, it does not demonstrate a relationship. I had no relationship with him or with most of the runners in that race. I am fine with that. My main concern was to finish the race without a mishap and then enjoy the company of friends on our way back to Iowa City.
I can see from this single print how difficult it would be to devote the same attention to the thousands of orphaned photographs in our house. I want to get through all of them for maybe the last time. Yet there is only enough time to live life once. It is a fine thing, though, to remember that specific August day in my home town.
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
Wednesday was a day like this. Sky above the Solon Public Library.
The hardest part of being an amateur photographer is making the images look different. For the most part, I prefer outdoors photography. Here a gallery of some of this week’s images.
Wildflowers along the trail.Big salad for dinner.Trail walking.Vegetables all cleaned up.CattailsFlowers along the state park trail.
Grandma Sarah Elizabeth (Dean) Miller’s bentwood rocking chair made from willow. She was my great, great grandmother. Photo taken by the author in 1983, Cox Hollow, Wise County, Virginia.
Sometimes we would go on a trip and take photographs. In fact, in my time, a trip and a film camera seemed to go together. Because I was able to purchase a camera with money from my newspaper route, I took photos when on family trips. When Mother and Father went on a trip they would take my camera. You go on a trip, you take some photographs to develop and show the folks back home. When trip photos got processed, we would sort and edit them. Sometimes we made them into an album. Simply put, trip photography was a cultural behavior with a beginning and endpoint and fixed technology for a trip’s duration.
I’m speaking of the pre-internet days. We got our first home computer on April 21, 1996. We didn’t do much with online photography until May 3, 2008 when I bought my first digital camera to make it easier to post on social media platforms. Back then, the process to put print photographs online had some obstacles, importantly, the lack of a scanner, which was expensive equipment. In 2025, with mobile device technology, that is all pretty seamless. It was not so in the 1980s and ’90s.
This photograph of Grandma Miller’s rocking chair was from a trip my spouse and I made to Virginia in 1983. The image records the artifact. There is a backstory. We both sat and rocked in the chair. We had a discussion about it with my great aunt Carrie who had possession of the rocker when we visited. We discussed it being made from local willow trees. I’m not sure, but believe I have a photograph of Grandma Miller’s daughter, Tryphena Ethel Miller sitting in it. (Spelling is “Tryphenia” on the 1940 U.S. Census). The chair is both an Appalachian artifact and a family heirloom. Forty years later, I don’t know what happened to it, although it may still be sitting on that front porch in Cox Hollow where we first saw it and took this photograph.
On that trip, my great aunt said she did not want her photograph taken. So many years later it is hard to remember the conversation. I believe it had to do with the Appalachian belief or superstition that there was a connection between a photograph and one’s soul or spirit. I was not trying to steal a part of Aunt Carrie’s soul. I respected her wishes and did not take a photo.
Also on that trip, my uncle, spouse and I visited Grandmother Ina Elizabeth Addington’s grave. She died in 1947 of food poisoning. She was also the granddaughter of Grandma Miller. My uncle got teary eyed while we were there visiting his mother, so I did not take a photograph of the grave marker just then. We returned the next day for that. Discretion is an important part of trip photography.
While trip photographs serve as a form of aide-memoire that conjures our living memory of what happened, so often they get separated from memory and stand as orphans. Their dependence on the photographer and the specific trip is a consideration in curating any photographic collection. In this case, I will likely put all the 1983 trip photographs that are not in an album in an envelope together and label it. Likewise, when considering which images to keep and which to label by writing a short note on the back, we can make a big difference when the photographer dies or leaves images behind. Deciding what to do in cases like this is a main task of this project.
This photograph has a date of July 1983 printed in red ink on the back. I added the following text: “Grandma Miller’s rocker. Made of willow. Grandma Miller was Tryphena’s mother.” A person needs to know more than a little context for that to make sense. Compared to most prints I have, those are a lot of words. Working through how and what to write on the back of prints is another main task of this project.
I could say a lot more about trip photography. As an organizing principle, it just makes sense to put all the images captured on a specific trip together. That doesn’t answer the question of passing along one’s heritage. I need to flesh this out in a future post.
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
When in the 1970s I bought a Minolta SRT-101 35 mm film camera I took it on short trips to take pictures and see the results. Film and film processing were inexpensive. I felt I was a step above people who bought their Brownie camera at the drug store to capture moments of family events. I felt like a creative person with everything to gain by capturing images that weren’t necessarily of people, or remembrances of where I had been. So it is with this image which even 50 years later attracts my eye.
I don’t know why I drove by myself to the Coralville Dam and Reservoir that winter day. I have living memory of the experience. From looking at the dozen or so prints I took that day, I was trying something creative, the way an artist fills a sketchbook with drawings. I hadn’t given much thought to framing the image, or anything else a photographer might consider. I’m thankful I included the signage in the frame to help remember where the film was exposed.
The artist’s sketchbook is a good metaphor for these kinds of prints. While there is a result of the effort, namely the print, what is more important is the learning process I went through that day: the practice at capturing images. 50 years ago, I did a lot of practicing. When digital photography came along and became ubiquitous, we still practice, yet if we don’t like the frame we can immediately take another shot. With decades of experience, all of that practice comes into play with every shot we take.
These were days when we didn’t see the image until receiving the prints from the processor, maybe a week or more later. The disconnectedness of the print from the creative act added something. While there was living memory of the photo shoot, the printed result was divorced from that. The image stands on its own. That is one point of being creative.
When I received my share of the settlement with the elevator company related to Father’s death, I equipped our band with an electric guitar, amplifiers, a public address system and the Volkswagen microbus in this photograph. The photograph is proof the vehicle existed. The band equipment has long been sold, yet this photo remains as a reminder of what once was. It is also proof that I was learning a craft.
The more I walk on the state park trail, I notice the way light filters through the foliage. The familiar reveals itself as varied in presentation. It takes an active mind to notice.
Here is a series of photos about light on the state park trail. Some are subtle. Some, less so. They are all valuable as part of my journey with photography.
Light on the state park trail.Foggy October sunrise.On the state park trail.Emerging from the trail.Light on a clump of trees.Clearing ahead.Sunlight crosses my path.Light on tree trunks.Cloudy day on the trail.Sunrise reflection.
In the end, photographs are objects. They have qualities — paper, coloration, moisture, processing technique, subject matter, and many others. In the beginning, one has to take a pile of them and just start organizing. This is especially true if during the collection process, there was no organizing principle, other than all photos go into a certain box labeled “photos.” It’s a process, or may be one once I have gone through everything on an initial pass. Here I’m talking about paper photographs.
Somehow I ended up with large quantities of photos, stacked one-on-one, placed together only by happenstance. Now I review them, one-by-one, to see where the journey leads. The immediate task is separating them into groups according to when they were taken. For example, there is a set of our young child getting a home permanent. They obviously go together in their own stack. Another stack is photographs I took when I lived in Mainz and from the travels around the area. It is a tall stack because I avoided thinking too much about them. They are easily grouped for later analysis. Going through them quickly is a necessary first step.
The hardest part of a review and sorting is to turn off memory while doing it. That was a stumbling block because I easily got distracted by memories evoked by the prints. I also felt I had to turn immediately to my autobiography and write about a set of photos. Now, one pile, one box, is sorted at a time. I group the objects together as they appear before me and as I recall how they went together.
Each pile could be a story in itself. To get through them, the stories need to be set on the sidetrack to be hooked up to the train later. Maybe it’s not optimal, yet it is a way to get from randomness to a better understanding of what I have available… and how each image might be used. This process will be about my personal cultural attributes, some of which I know, and some lie unawares in the conglomeration of personal cultural artifacts.
For now, I decided to make a weekly post about how my photography process evolves. The first one is here. Going forward, I will use the tag A Life of Photos. I hope readers will follow along.
Journey Home 
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