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.
Our small family gathered around my writing table as I displayed a PowerPoint slide show of images downloaded from the Johnson County Democrats Hall of Fame event. Our purpose was to view the dozen images, yet also to consider my thousands of photographs with an eye toward using them for many purposes. Mainly, I like photography, and don’t want to leave the raw materials of a life behind in a disorderly fashion. I thought it prudent to get feedback on this project from other family members. This post springboards from our hour or so discussion while also considering the scope of the issue.
Using Photographs Now.
At 73 years I don’t have a lot of extra time to be looking at old photographs. The question that prompted our family discussion is what will happen to all the paper and digital photographs I collected in a lifetime when I am gone? So often I got hung up with that question it was difficult to live in the now and do something with them. There are plenty of things to do with old photographs in the here and now.
My use of photographs on this blog and on other social media platforms is straight forward. I take a photo of my morning coffee and post it with a brief message on BlueSky. When I take my daily walk I’m on the lookout for conditions that merit a photo and then post them either here or on BlueSky. If I attend a public event, I’m looking for a single image to use on this blog. This is what my quotidian life of photography has become. It is okay. The absence of posed photographs is noted and mostly, desired.
Photo displays could be added into current usage. For example, like the referenced slide show, I could create another set to be shown when we are next together. Likewise, it could be shared on Discord or another online sharing application. This would provide some motivation to both define projects in small bites, and to meet a deadline for producing a slideshow. Partly, this mimics the old film and print days when I got a packet of photos back from the drug store and wanted to share them with family and friends. It would also nudge me to find projects relevant to the audience. Social media has eroded interest in that type of viewing, yet with a little gumption it could easily be renewed and appreciated.
As I write my autobiography I post relevant photos on a magnetic white board. This is not a permanent shrine to my life and the people in it. It is a living thing from which I gain inspiration. Which photos are on it changes constantly. At some point they will be taken down and stored away in more permanent places. This type of photo display serves the specific purpose of kindling memories so I can do a better job writing about my life. Among the uses of photographs this is as valid as any of them.
I have limited interest in creating traditional photo albums. As the ones we have age, we should maintain them as appropriate. The rubber cement we used to affix prints to a page apparently doesn’t hold up over the decades. Maintaining those memories is important, although I’m not sure I would make another like them. Albums have been a medium for creative expression and that will likely continue to some degree if I find a topic.
Archival Review and Storage.
The state of my photographs is neglected. I have piles and envelopes with many different photos in them. There are multiple shoe boxes of photographs. There are a couple dozen photo albums. My digital photos are filed by date and it’s hard to tell what they are without looking. I also have photos stored in file folders related to projects. That’s not to mention those I’ve posted here or on social media. The goal of any project is to feel I’m giving due attention to images I captured: to neglect images less.
I decided to use the envelope method to store print photos that are similar in some respect. That is, groups of photos will be stored, and to some extent labeled, and placed in envelopes according to some criteria. For example, photos of certain friends might have their own envelope. It is important to write on the back of prints what the viewer is looking at. Also, why are certain photos grouped together. If I want to pass on stories to the millennial generation, this is one way of doing it. It is worth making time for the effort.
Likewise there is an archivist concern about taking care of photos in storage. In particular, how is print exposure to moisture being controlled? Is the cloud storage solution the right one for digital photographs? Which cloud storage is the best option?
Inevitably, these concerns lead to touching each photograph and doing something with it. To accommodate this, I feel it is important to set up a regular time each week to work on that. The current schedule is to work on photography each Tuesday for a couple of hours.
Making New Photographs.
Going forward, the goal is to save fewer photographs. If I take ten shots of a sunrise, I should keep only the best one, making the decision within an hour of taking a photograph. Not doing so is pure laziness. While it is easy to make multiple exposures, the goal is to find what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment.” From a photo production standpoint, using unposed, candid moments captured with a focus on composition and the “decisive moment” includes learning how to better frame an image, attention to lighting, and perhaps taking multiple shots, and then discarding the lessor quality images. One assumes we won’t return to the lesser images.
As far as printing digital images goes, there needs be a reason to do so. It can be to mail an image to the people in it, or in rare cases, pasting them into a photo album on a specific topic.
Like everything I do these days, managing photography is an ongoing discussion. Time with the potential inheritors of a collection of stuff just makes sense, and I’m glad we had the conversation.
~First in a series of posts about managing personal photographs
Ambient temperatures were in the mid-40s yet it was the wind, gusting at 25 mph, that made garlic planting impossible. I rescheduled. The soil is right, but I didn’t want to fight the wind. This year’s garlic is an experiment. It is not going as planned.
This excerpt from my journal seems apropos for today.
So be it, a life of creating starts. Here a thermometer installed on the kitchen awning. Here some seeds planted, a corner raked. A book read, a lifelong process, never ending, of small acts, viewable only with an eye more omniscient than mine: as the nuns taught, “All for the honor and glory of God.”
To live a life: this is what is presented.
Like a pioneer, I step into the wilderness. Though others may have lived here before, my presence gives new life to the present. Not forgetting what my ancestors have created, I strike a new path, and though a crowd goes the main road, I’ll take the paths still traveled by deer and rabbits and birds.
I feel the number of people who live engaged in life is diminishing. Many seem to accept that society is a prioiri. What we do takes place in a context set by others. They do not realize that we are the set designers, as well as the authors of this drama. And drama only comes as we will.
We must make a sculpture of the clay of our lives. Something created in a manner that will yield beauty and worth to the observer. Whether that observer be society’s poor or rich art patrons, or God alone. It is critical the creation be made. We must attempt it. Though only God may be watching, in his eyes, our lives, small and made of clay, have purpose, and worth. But the charge is ours, each one to live a life. (Personal Journal, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, April 13, 1986).
Enchiladas, Spanish rice, and sauteed corn and bell pepper.
It seems early for a kitchen garden post yet here we are. The combination of a mild winter and plentiful plantings last year brought a Saturday vegetable harvest. There were collards, kale, cilantro, and spring onions growing in last year’s planting areas. Volunteer garlic came up where I plan tomatoes this year. After harvest, I cleaned the produce and made dinner with it. We had enchiladas, Spanish rice, and corn sauteed with bell pepper. I also used preserved guajillo chili sauce from last year. My recipe for enchiladas is here.
This meal has a lot of steps yet is worth the effort. The point I make today is while I enjoy plate photos like the one above, the sought end result is fleeting creativity in the kitchen, set in time, as I use ingredients picked an hour or two before. It is of such fleeting essences our lives are made.
During my time I viewed many television cooking shows, and lately, short-form videos about cooking. Rarely does any one of them stand out. Some are formulaic, some a brief distraction. There were so many of them, all the recipes and processes began to look alike. I mean, we know the combination of onion, carrot and celery with bay leaves makes a delicious soup base. We should know the Louisiana “holy trinity” is onions, bell peppers, and celery. How many times do we need to hear it? I imagine most of us have heard it enough.
It is possible to be a creative person. Creativity has some end goal in mind, with cooking, perhaps a plate photo or making a memory of a specific meal. Yet it is the process for which we live. I would never have put collard greens in the filling of an enchilada, except that’s what I found in the garden that day. I found fresh cilantro and that unplanned addition characterized the dish. While I often have recipes in mind, they are little more than a suggestion when cooking. The best of what we eat is often the result of a process that had no recipe in mind at the beginning. At least, it can be.
Grocers have a problem with my kind of food creativity. A grocer in a big box store must stock thousands of items while waiting for some customer to come along seeking one. They rely upon an item’s popularity to cover overhead and make a profit. Popular as they are, I can’t imagine many circumstances when I would buy fresh cilantro or spring onions at the grocer, even though they stock them all year. Therein lies the difference between my kitchen garden and cooking. There is something magical about a kitchen garden that can’t be replaced by commodities from the grocer.
Enchiladas are a well-liked meal in the United States and elsewhere. Our small community has two Mexican restaurants that sell them. If I wanted a Mexican-style dinner, I could just buy take out. That would be missing the point of time in the kitchen garden.
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