Photographs

Recently after my great Uncle Lyle passed away, relatives going through his belongings have been sending pictures to my mother and other family that "belong" to our side of the family. This has me feeling and thinking all kinds of things--none of which are particularly surprising given the circumstances--but it is strange to come into contact with these pictures that Lyle surrounded himself with.

The ties that bind us together are brought into focus: images that document lives lived, time spent growing and changing, and what all of this suggests and covers up is equally lovely and so sad. I have a feeling that the gap in photographs during my grandfather's early teens revels a hellish time. After my grandmother died he told me some of that story: living in barns, being used in a slave-like state by friends of his father's after his mother died in child birth--a family dissolved by an emotionally distant father. After he ran away, he worked harder than I can imagine a twelve year-old working to afford food and shelter and who found time to study at night with a kind school teacher who personally took him on as her student and saw him to the 8th grade. These things, I know, are not a part of what I see. He's a small boy in the images, carefree and not yet aware of the hard fate in front of him.

Likewise, my grandmother's scrapbook was buried in a dresser drawer in the room I often slept in growing up--so close and yet so out of reach. It is full of the ephemera of a high school girl in the 1920s who went to dances, posed for pictures, and collected dance cards. When I first saw the book after she died it was like opening up a new world of her life--so strange to have it open up after she died, but it did. I was captivated by these photographs from the scrapbook because the woman I knew is so evident in them. Yet who was this girl then? What did she want out of her life?

(Click to see larger version, very cool if you do!)

Through all of these things, the stuff left over, my grandmother's life took on new dimension for me. As cliched as it sounds, she took shape as a person--I could see beyond the gray hair and curlers that she must have adopted in her early 50s, judging by the pictures I've seen. Old before her time.

These recent pictures have added to my understanding of her life, as well as my grandfather's life. These pictures are endlessly fascinating to me, and I'm so grateful that for the split second of the pose, the shutter click, and the amazing alchemical process that produces the images. But most of all, I am grateful to--and you can see this in the last picture below--to the shadowy figures who snapped the pictures, the picture takers who wanted to capture the moment.


Later, after the birth of my mother and her siblings, after the tragic death of their first-born daughter, the series of images gets to me. The story plays out. The pictures tell the story--and yet they miss something. I'm lonesome as I look at these pictures for the conversations I could have had, for the smell of a soapy smelling kitchen in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and for the voices of a generation now gone.