Some new colors this week. It’s garlic planting time and when Friday is over, I hope it will be in.
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Friday Photos
Tag: photography
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A Life of Photos Part VIII
It’s one thing to take a posed photo — another to decide how it should be used: framed, shared online, or tucked away. That’s what this post explores.
We hired a photographer for our 55th high school class reunion. My instructions were to catch people looking at the lens with eyes open. I count 42 cheerful faces in this group photo. Of a class that numbered 260, that’s a lot still living. A few faces are partly hidden yet the image captures what was most important: proof we were there and together again.
Anyone who uses a camera seems likely to take posed photos. In the digital age it is easy to post them in social media and forget. Likewise, without being tethered to film, we can take many multiple shots of the same pose and then easily pick the best one to use. This is basic modern stuff.
The roots of my interest in posed photography, like so many creative things, lies with my maternal grandmother. I wrote about this in my book, An Iowa Life.
Mae was an influence on my photography. She purchased inexpensive cameras at the drug store and used them to record moments with the family. After researching the Polish community near Wilno, Minnesota, I came to believe her behavior with cameras in the 1960s had its roots in the inner cultural and spiritual realm filled with drama and emotion described previously. The surviving photograph of her sister Tillie’s confirmation is one example of this. The desire to pose and capture a photo was something creative I didn’t understand at the time. We were plain folk and when we got dressed for church, or to attend an event, it was a big deal. Mae wanted to capture those moments on film, consistent with her Polish upbringing. It’s a natural impulse that presents an interpretation of who we were. Of course, we always wanted to put the best foot forward in these constructed frames. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
When I was a grader, use of a photograph was simple: put it in an album. Such albums were defined more by the time frame in which film was exposed than subject matter. It was as if to say, “I just took these photographs, let’s save them.” On occasion we would make multiple prints of a “good” photo to give or mail to friends and relatives. Anything that did not make it into an album was stored in the envelope in which it came from the processor, along with the negatives. Eventually they accumulated in shoe boxes.
On May 4, 2008, I took my first photograph with a Kodak Easy Share digital camera. It changed everything. In particular, the subject matter of images was less about posing and more about casual capture, landscape and still life. We could snap photos like there was no tomorrow because of the lack of constraints caused by film. The number of images stored on a camera, and then transferred to a computer, exploded. A photograph became less special the way my grandmother understood it. It became a fungible commodity where without close examination everything looked the same. I mean, who had time for close examination of all those digital photographs?
With the rise of social media after 2006, a new place to save photographs began. When I post a photo on my BlueSky account, I do so with the idea other people might appreciate the work. Sometimes one goes viral but most of them get a few likes and then move on in the endless feed. Who knew looking at photos would become doom-scrolling? Social media lacks the permanence of a print or album, yet it is something important.
Most of the photographs from my high school class reunion will likely sit in a folder on the cloud until I want them again. I may get an 8 x 10 version of the reunion class photograph and put it in a standard frame. Partly to keep it handy to evoke its memories. Partly because as one person on our planning committee wrote, “regrettably, we will likely lose more classmates before our 60th reunion.” According to Social Security actuarial tables, 10 or 11 of the people in this photo are likely to die by then. The meaning is obvious. It remains what may be the last time I saw some of my friends. Isn’t this the reason we take photographs?
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Fall Photos
This week was all about the shift to autumn—putting up hot peppers, processing apples, and getting ready for winter. Add a high school class reunion on Sept. 25, and it’s already been a busy season. Here are some of the best recent shots.
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Photo Friday
How I view my daily walk is changing, and with it the images captured on my mobile device. Here are ten from the second half of September.
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End of Summer
Just over a week until autumn begins so I am taking a break from bloggery to enjoy these last days. Thanks for following my posts.
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A Life of Photos – Part VII
How does a photographer capture well-known sites? I would argue professional photographers whose work appears on post cards serve a useful function in capturing a personal experience.
This photograph of Mount Rushmore was created in part by my being there. Composition of the resulting image is due largely to the design of the visitors center which presented a platform from which I took it. The light is good and the talus provides context. However, picking up a postcard at the gift shop eliminates variations inherent in converting a digital image to a print. If you stick to selecting familiar images, postcards can be interchangeable with printed photos in terms of remembering the experience. I submit having both types of image upgrades the experience.
The advent of the “bucket list” likely ended a lot of meaningful photography. If Mount Rushmore were on my bucket list, I might have stepped in front of the camera to record myself with the famous sculpture. Maybe at home I would have a bulletin board where I pinned all my bucket list photographs. People are free to do what they want, but for me, the memory of that moment’s experience is what stands out more than a trophy photograph hanging on a wall or uploaded to a website.
Defining who we are in the context of our lives, and who we want to be matters more than an arbitrary list of places we seek to visit. Above all, it is about the experience. A personal photograph or postcard is a subset of what that experience is. Photos are not necessarily the most important part of it.
What was this experience about? My friend since seventh grade and I left our spouses behind and made a long road trip out west. The furthest point was Missoula, Montana where we visited another high school friend and their spouse. Mount Rushmore was one of the less interesting stops we made. We were so close to it we felt obliged to stop, so we did. It was tacked on to an experience about something else.
I am a bit old school in that I don’t see much purpose to video recording a well-know site. My aunt, uncle, and their family lived in Europe for a number of years. They took home movies on 8 millimeter film when they traveled. I recall one where they visited the leaning tower of Pisa and recorded the kids trying to push it the rest of the way over. It was a family joke, and that’s fine. I hope they bought a postcard to remember the architecture while they were at it, even if that wasn’t their interest. Life is not always a joke.
I had only one photograph in my memoir, An Iowa Life. However, I looked at a lot of them while writing it. A photograph invokes living memories and it was those memories that drove my writing. I expect to return to this image of Mount Rushmore when I get into the post-analog part of my life. For that purpose, it won’t matter if an image was one I took or a postcard. That’s as it should be.
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This Week in Photos
As the garden turned from tomatoes to apples, I captured plenty of images. Here are some of them.
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A Life of Photos – Part VI
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.
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Week in Photos
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.
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A Life of Photos – Part V
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.
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