A 70-Year Shutter Click
time is just an eye blink
Down in Florida last year, I began to organize my parents’ 6 big bins of photographs, the earliest of which reached back into the 1890s. Aside from being an invaluable record of my family history, the trove also provides, upstream, a fractal of the entire era of mass manual photography. No vintage filters necessary, just IRL sepia-tinged frozen time.
Film was a limited resource then, and care was taken, even by the most casual photographer, to frame and compose even the most throwaway shots (mostly). There was also tremendous lag time — sometimes years lol — between the shooting and developing of a roll of film.
With no easy way to share photos in the Kodachrome era, save for giving away, or developing extra copies to hand off or mail, most of the photos I leafed through hadn’t been looked at in a while. I felt the archeological thrill (and import) of re-discovery, for sure.
My parents’ archive (mercifully, in a way), stops right around the mid-2000s, when pretty much all day-to-day photography went digital. Unlike today’s weightless piles of e-photos, the sheer tonnage of the bins is correlative with the amount of time they cover. A hundred years of photos yields around 100 pounds of photos in this case. Fwiw, I did get bonus workouts moving the archive from a spare bedroom to the garage and back to alternate organizing the collection with making room for guests.
In the last bin I opened, I found an envelope packed with 100+-year old shots of my great and great-great grand families.
Digging deeper into the bin, shots of Morris and my grandmother, Ida, offered the entire arc of their relationship. The two shots below are the earliest (1941) and latest (2011) photos I found of them. Pretty sure the latter pic is the last photo we have of Ida, who passed away later that year.
The “paper” photo from 2011 is a printout of a picture from Morris’ lo-res Razr flip-phone camera. There’s a hint of irony in how if not for the printing, this photo would no longer exist. Morris’ phone is long lost to the ether, with who-knows-how-many other photos of his and Ida’s life at their last home at an assisted living facility in northern New Jersey.
70 years is quite an eye blink.
Just a shutter click, really.
Ida and Morris, Wildwood, NJ, 1941
[135 format, camera and photographer unknown]
Ida and Morris, Pompton Plains, NJ, 2011
[Motorola Razr Flip Phone printout, photographer unknown]
