Bill Shapiro on The Strange Lure of Other People’s Photos

This is a great piece.

Though only tangential in scape it reminds me of http://foundmagazine.com, I bought one of their first print offerings back in 2005. It's a different sort of idea, and they don't just collect photographs.
 
Yes, thanks Lynn, the whole subject of the fascination with found photos is interesting. Bill Shapiro is 55 years old, so, born in 1965 and would have come of age when most of the “new” world was already in place. I also noticed the melancholy tone, and could not help but wonder if someone quite a bit older would have been so maudlin about the subject. People who are 75 to 85 or more, for instance, in my experience tend to see those images and just be more like “Hey, look, there’s Joe!” and go on with dinner, sans the introspection.
I’m 70 and find the world in those photos more of a comfort and joy than a cause for morose brooding (brooding might not be the best word).
Those photos were much closer to a life I have known than one he ever could possibly have known except through photos. So, what they “mean” is going to be very different to someone who lived in a world before polio vaccines than one who lived in a later, more casual world. Older people tend to look at photos of banks of young children in iron lungs, which they would have experienced in person, as I have, with more equanimity than younger people who have just seen photos and cannot even imagine what that world was like. Rather, they do imagine it, but never correctly, because photos can never take you back to some place you have never been. They cannot actually, “put you there”, no matter what you might think.
The couple in the bleak landscape was probably pretty happy.
He’s right about the number of deaths people go through, however. I hope that fact hasn’t only now just dawned on some people. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I’m sure most people don’t know what on earth it is I am on about this time. Again. :)
Something about the nature of the meaning of photographs, something about the impossibility of imparting to younger people either via histories or photos the nature of the past, especially when it is distorted either willfully or accidentally by those who were not there for the “education” of those younger still. It’s an interesting area of study, but will always be a blind alley.

Anyway, was a starting point for some contemplation this fine Sunday morning about things the author can never understand. Good articles are like that.
 
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