Two from the Archives

These aren't my photos. In fact, so far, they're the only photos that I've posted on my blog that weren't taken by me--but these images, along with many others, are now partly my responsibility, and one of my goals, in addition to digitally preserving and restoring them, is to give other people the chance to see them as well. Snapshots are extremely historically important as documents, and when they are made public, a personal and highly individualized visual lexicon is suddenly open to a more general public interpretation. It's at this point that the boundaries between snapshots, photojournalism and fine art break down, and the distinctions become a lot more indistinct.

These images weren't made by professional photographers, just hobbyists. Personally, I think most of us would be proud to have taken the second photograph -- it's a great moment, very intimate and beautifully framed and composed. And it depicts a time and place that no longer exists. Of course, part of the beauty lies in the fact that these photographs look old. In the age of digital photography, 35 mm Kodachrome slides have themselves become signifiers. And the dust and scratches add to that as well, sort of the "metadata." What you're looking at here are the uncorrected scans, exactly as I made them--prior to the removal of dust, the addition of contrast, the color correction (or, rather, the attempt to shift the colors back to the way they used to be, before decades of lying in a dusty shoebox in the heat and humidity of the South took their toll). After all of the long hours and stress and attention to detail and various frustrations with the amazing tool that is Photoshop, I realized that there is quite a bit of magic in these "things as they are"--or, more accurately, things that they became.

Of course, snapshot photography is first and foremost a window into the ways that people document their own lives, and what they choose to recognize as important. But--knowing nothing about the people in these photographs, the obvious question is, what exactly was it that was important to the photographers in these moments? And the obvious follow-up question is, what makes them interesting and significant to us, as we try to translate the personal, communal, and universal elements at work here, in terms of our own experiences? The only hard information that I'll provide for now will be dates: The top photo was taken in Autumn 1967, the bottom photo sometime in 1968.

I'll continue to post more of these images, along with updates and commentary. And I'll continue to spend late nights working on digitally preserving and restoring the archival photographs of a small rural community that is, in many ways, extremely important and unique.