A Box of Photos

     I love photography and I am always delighted to pour over and explore photos of many genres: fashion, architectural, pin-up, sports or editorial, they all engage me. Over the years I’ve also developed a passion for looking at old photos that you’d find at flea markets or vintage stores.
     These photos are usually in cigar boxes or shoe boxes. They’re just a random assortment of photos, sometimes stretching across decades from people I’ve never known, usually selling for a quarter or fifty cents a piece. The ones I like best are the ones that seem rather ordinary or unremarkable. Just people hanging out in a very informal setting, though I like some old formal ones too. I bought about 7 or 8 photos of a wedding ceremony that I found at a vintage store for 50 cents each. The photos appear to be from the 1940’s. All the women had Andrew Sister’s hair styles. There was one man decked out in a sailor’s outfit, right out of “On The Town”. This wedding took place in someone’s small apartment with floral wallpaper, not a church. There are a few photos of the best man and maid of honor signing the wedding license at a card table. The man who performed the ceremony was in a suit and not in any religious garb, and the bride did not have a traditional wedding dress. One of the photos was posted onto a blue card, which had written on the back, “West Coast Whlse. Drug Company-Seattle, Washington”. This is probably where they developed the film. This is another thing I like about discovering photos like these; sleuthing.

A wedding from the 1940's?

The bride looks excited

The Maid of Honor signing the marriage license

That little girl could be 80 years old today

     The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, may be trite but it’s also true. It’s fun to try to figure out roughly what year a photo was taken based on the fashions and styles or to look for other things that might reveal something about the subjects in the photo and what was going on with them at the time. I love imagining what happened to the people in these photos. Did the couple in the wedding photos stay married? Was it during WW2 and did the groom report for duty the next day to get shipped off overseas? Had they both been married before? Did they have kids? Grandkids? I enjoy thinking about these questions and coming up with some answers. Other questions I usually contemplate is how did these photos find their way into a cigar box at a store called Deluxe Junk in Seattle? How was I able to lay a couple of bucks down on the counter and purchase them in the first place? Was there no family member who wanted to keep these photos taken at this unorthodox 1940’s wedding? All this is just part of the mystery. Maybe the person who had them last passed away and they were the last member of their family so no one cared what happened to them. I’m sure a lot of photos just end up getting thrown away; not everyone has a sentimental attachment to photos. One day as I was looking through photos like these and imagining who the people were in them, I had a sobering thought: I too will end up as just a picture in a shoebox that someone else comes across.
     That person would be looking at a photo of me and ask themselves what became of that handsome devil? Which photos would they find? The one of me when I was five and I’m with my two brothers sitting on this old wall behind our house, eating ice cream sandwiches and making a mess. Or maybe the one of me sitting on an abandoned couch at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge that just happened to be there. Or will it be a more formal photo like when I was best man at my friend’s wedding. In that one I’m wearing a tuxedo from the Don Johnson collection in dolphin grey. 

Eating ice cream sandwiches in South Jersey-I'm on the left

Who brought this couch to The Brooklyn Bridge?

Rocking the Don Johnson Tux, with my grandmother

     Not only do I have these family photos in my possession but also all the ones I’ve purchased over the years. If I'm the only one left in the immediate family, someone who comes across my store bought photos is likely to assume that the people in them must be relatives. They might think that that couple getting married are my grandparents. They will make up their own stories. They might take all these photos and sell them to some vintage store where they will be mixed with all the other photos in that store’s collection. Or maybe somebody will just trash all the photos and they’ll live in a landfill for 500 years until some sort of archaeological excavation takes place and my photos are discovered under tons of garbage. There, in the hands of the archaeologist, will be that photo of me with very long hair, sitting in the hot tub, holding a beer and looking like a headbanger. What interpretation of that photo might they make? They will try and imagine who I was, or what life was like back then. I will have been long dead but for that moment, I will be alive in that archaeologist’s mind.

Living the good life

     I guess in the last couple of decades most photos will be in digital form. Certainly that will be the case the way forward. So instead of shoeboxes and albums, photos will just live on various discs, hard drives and servers. That’s how they will be passed on down, moving from server to server as time goes on unless someone, deciding they need the space and want to get rid of digital clutter, just deletes folders of photos from the cloud. But whether digital or analog, the idea is the same: a photo of you will be gazed upon and pondered by someone else long after you're gone. “For whom the bells tolls, it tolls for thee.”