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.
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.
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
I decided to call my morning exercise a hike instead of a walk. That’s mostly because when my sneakers wore out, I replaced them with a pair of hiking shoes. I don’t know if this will persist, but I’m trying it on for size, to wit:
Here are some photos from my morning hike.
Here are some shots from around the yard for April 20, 2025.
Few things speak of spring like newly budded and flowering plants. They provide hope on a cloudy and dark day.
My farmer friends are lining up customers for the 2025 growing season. February is the time folks sign up for a community supported agriculture share and there is a limit to how many shares each farm can produce. I used to belong to a CSA yet no longer need one. My large garden usually produces enough good stuff to serve our family. I wish them a productive and profitable season. This photo is one taken after I harvested bell peppers to take home, process, and freeze.
Part of writing an autobiography involves photographs and art work. The visual arts convey something much different from narrative text. In An Iowa Life: A Memoir, the first volume of my autobiography, I included a single photograph of me as a toddler. In volume two, I may include more than one, depending upon the expense. The book is not available to the public at present, but may be once early readers all provide feedback. Here is the cover with the photograph:
The way I used photographs in volume one was to describe something based on them, using my narrative to control the meaning. This is important because we don’t want to distract the reader from the energy of the narrative by introducing a photograph that can be interpreted in multiple ways. By describing photographs, instead of inserting them into the text, we can better guide readers.
Part two begins in 1981, a time when I took many film photographs. I keep the prints in boxes near my writing space, and in a few photo albums we made. I don’t know how to process them, yet at a minimum, I will get them out and look at them. There are a host of projects one could create with old photographs. A couple of days ago, I cleared access to the piles of boxes where the photographs rest.
I had a flip phone with a camera and took this photo of Senator Barack Obama on Sept. 17, 2006. The video of that year’s Harkin Steak Fry is here. It was one of the first digital photographs I took. The quality is not the best, yet it records the moment.
Obama is in the rope line after he gave his keynote address. You can see Chet Culver and Tom Vilsack behind him. I shook his hand and was surprised at how genuine he was in our brief conversation. He had quite a handshake.
On May 3, 2008, I bought my first digital camera and took this photo after opening the box. Once I entered the realm of digital photography, the number of images exploded. Cameras in smart phones changed how I looked at photography. Now I take many exposures of a scene and then pick and edit the best one. There is no additional cost for multiple exposures and device memory seems unlimited.
This has been a roundabout way of getting to the topic. In figuring out how to address photography in part two, I need to:
At the beginning, this project is hopeful. It should be a fun year reviewing the images of my past and recalling the living memories behind them.
Here are twelve photos that are among the best I took this year. Click on the upper left image to open the slide show. Hope you enjoy!
Editor’s Note: This is a chapter from my autobiographical work in progress.
By 1962 I owned a camera and used it to photograph our neighborhood. It was an early form of creativity that stayed with me all my life.
I walked north from home on Marquette Street and took snapshots of the Levetzow’s holiday display at the intersection with High Street. They owned Model Dairy Company and at Christmas filled their whole yard with lighted Christmas decorations. On the southwest corner of their house was a large crèche. To its right was a lighted display of Santa, his sleigh, and reindeer. We viewed them as an affluent family, such affluence being on conspicuous display at the holidays. They had a kid-sized model of their dairy delivery van, although none of us local kids got to drive or play with it.
I photographed the holiday display at the house across the street to the south. This was a rental through which families moved frequently. Eventually, a young Joe Whitty and his family moved there when he worked at the nearby Mercy Hospital bakery. He later opened his own chain of pizza and ice cream restaurants called Happy Joe’s.
Using a camera was an inexpensive way to have fun. Because the process took so long, it seemed more creative: requiring thought, editing, and an ability to understand the camera viewer and how it would relate to the finished print. I did not crop many photos at first but accepted what the processor developed.
We posed for pictures with my film camera. I gave more thought to each frame than I might today because the results were not immediately available. There were only so many shots on a roll of film, so it felt necessary to get the framing and pose right. It was a process of experimentation and of managing expenses. Developing film could take a while, depending upon when the entire roll was exposed, and when one could get it to the drug store to be developed. Photographs were special and I believed they would have enduring value.
There is a photo of me in my altar boy cassock and surplus, one of us kids bowling, and many posed photos of all of us in the foyer. One favorite foyer photo is of Mother and Father dressed up in costumes to go out on New Year’s Eve in 1962. The following January, I captured my sister’s birthday party during which we all danced the twist. Mother took some of those shots. My parents had just begun listening to long-playing records at home and had copies of popular LPs by twist artists like Chubby Checker and Fats Domino.
In 1963 I began buying color film. Pictures survived: of Easter, my sister’s first communion, a trip to the park, Father standing next to the wrecked 1959 Ford. Mostly they were posed and signified a special event.
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 I 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.
Because photography was a technology with numerous steps, and there was a cost of film and prints, I don’t have many photos from my earliest days. However, I have a lot by comparison. The ones that survive tell me who I was and inform us about our family culture. They are an important part of remembering who we were. From that early time, I began thinking about how to narrate my life using a camera. There is a direct creative thread running from 1962 to the present and spun on my use of cameras.
Some shots from my morning walk on Oct. 19, 2023.
Some shots from my morning hike on the Lake Macbride State Park Trail.
Journey Home
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