When my siblings and I were cleaning out my parents house a few years ago, I came across a lot of old photos going back to the 1940's and 50's. Most must have been taken by our dad, some by my older brother and some of the later ones by me. I grabbed a bunch of the 120 negatives that were tucked away in some of the envelopes, thinking maybe one day I'd try to do something artistic with them. I guess I forgot about them once I returned home, because I rediscovered these gorgeous little gems while sorting through Eddie's stuff. The negatives were at the bottom of a "keepsake" box we'd parked high on a shelf in our closet. There are about 100 of them. (Of course, now I wish I'd gathered more.)
I had the negs scanned and am just now beginning to make some prints. Turns out my father seemed to have had an innate sense of composition. During his 97 years he never claimed to have an artistic bone in his body and never devoted any time to creative expression.
Family snapshots are casually made records. Here we are at the Grand Canyon. This is the time we went swimming with our cousins at the lake. These were my cabin mates at camp. Here's my daughter's 4th birthday party. Look how much in love we were.
I've always been fascinated by found snapshots, especially those of families and dogs. (Here's a blog post I wrote about my dog photo collection.) The vernacular photos we find at flea markets, yard sales and on Ebay are fun to study, and every now and then it's possible to discover one that has great composition, good subject matter, considered arrangement of shapes and an interesting perspective ... one that looks like it could've been made by a fine art photographer. That's often due to happy accidents, but since I found more than a few of these among my family's 120 negatives, I'm going to give my dad some credit for making some thoughtful decisions before squeezing the shutter. Even if they were all luck, it's fun to imagine...
Here are a few of my favorites. Next week I'll share the ones I took.
