Fade

[rejectomorph]

Mom dug out boxes of old photographs, all in glorious gray scale. There were distant ancestors, great aunts and uncles, in-laws, ancient people posed with descendants then children, now themselves ancient or dead, pictures of children who died at six, or ten, or twenty, people standing on porches of houses long since demolished, or standing next to streamlined new cars that would now be antiques had they survived. There was one picture of my oldest nephew in a stroller, my dog lying next to him, the background a view of the hazy San Gabriel Valley behind our house in the hills on some serene day ages ago.

I myself might have taken that picture, as well as several others from around that time, with our old Kodak Duaflex, as I started doing that when I was about eight or nine years old. Odd, that the pictures I may have taken seem as archaic as those from long before I was born. They are all shards of moments and places made only slightly less ephemeral than their vast, unseen context by having been captured on film. The pictures jog the memory, but only those memories restore the identity of those pictures. A few of the pictures have already become anonymous. Some day, all will be. I don't know which state evokes greater melancholy.

Comments

[carbonunit.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see you scan these photos and post them to Flickr or somewhere. Have you got a scanner?

[rejectomorph]

No scanner yet. I've been planning on getting a printer-scanner-copier, but I don't want to go too cheap on it. I'd like one that would scan slides and negatives as well as prints and paper. I've been considering this Canon, for one (five ink cartridges could prove costly over time, though, and I can't find their prices on the web yet.) I'd also considered this less expensive Epson Stylus, but it's gotten some pretty negative reviews.

[marseille.livejournal.com]

I've been pretty obsessed with old photos myself in recent months. Sadly there's no one to help identify them, but at least one side of the family was compulsive about writing notes on the back, or captions, even!
Makes me want to take my pictures NOW in black & white, but I'd have to wait longer to get them, I'm sure.