Lost in the times of a photograph

“It’s a really beautiful thing how lost we are, and we want to get even more lost sometimes.” (David Lynch)

How to look back on our old photographs? We begin somewhere, sometime.

I begin somewhere and sometime, so I choose the crying girl. She will become my archivist. I ask you to consider her, from her crinkled, stricken face to bare legs carrying her away from the group and towards the photographer. Think what you will about her, and let your first impressions – whatever they may be - flutter in the space around you because they will probably fly away before the end. Then do the same for the others in the picture. Slowly allow yourself to be pulled into the scene behind her. The faces, gazes, and ways of sitting on the grass, the faint suggestion of alliances and distances, summer clothes from another era, clover and dandelions on a dry lawn, a small brick house with a picture window, awnings, and a chair on the porch with one of the older children tucked behind it. Then the pony and hired man. You might wonder where they came from, what they experienced that day, how much the man was paid, what life the pony had. Finally, who held the camera and pressed the shutter button at that precise moment?

Although I have no memory of it, I know that I was the crying girl and this was a children’s birthday party in the late 1950s. The party took place in a tract house suburb of Detroit.

But now, think again. The statement I, you, or any of us rarely make is: “This is a material object from the past surfacing in the present.” This picture, this veneer, this piece of paper that bears the image, has survived some six decades. It is in black and white, a first marker of its pastness. The crying girl in the photo is also the person now holding the old print in her hand. Then scanning it. Reproducing it. Pasting it into this text. Making simple observations about it.

Yet the photograph belongs to another, larger history. A history of light, mirrors, vision, camera obscuras, film rolls, chemistry, trees, and paper. A technological history. Collisions with nature. A social history. Stories of power, ownership, and keeping records of times, people, and places. Only belatedly is there someone holding a private photograph, wondering about its content, longing to climb into it (or out of it, for I am her and she is me). Only belatedly does it attach to a history of memory, forgetting, identity, childhood, and mementos.

So, the picture recalls life before and after its reason for being, and the birthday party’s moment in time and place. Before and after the click of the camera and the turning to black and white, the making of negative and print, passing around of the print, telling stories about the party and the people who lived on this once populous, now quiet suburban street, then finally, tumbling through family hands and generations and boxes of photos. Tumbling into now. Changing meaning along the way. Shedding. Gathering. Shedding. Outlasting those who might remember the photograph or the party. One day, a stranger may come across an old photo and fail to recognize the faces or the place. Content turning to oblivion. And a snapshot, a thin piece of paper that surely will not stand the test of time.

I’m still here. Here for now. With my photograph. But who am I in all this? A child, adult, both? Memoirist, hopeless ‘nostalgiac’, historian, photographer, collector of old photographs, storyteller? It seems I am none of these completely. I am all of them partially.

I’m just archiving. Lost somewhere between memory and history, lost in the times of a photograph. Lost in a good way.