Lost pictures

Buying second hand cameras sometimes gives some unexpected extras. In some cameras there is still a film and then the mystery starts. From whom and when is this and who or what is her in this picture.  Some clues one can have that maybe give some extra information: the country of origin where the camera comes from, the film used, the age of the camera itself, … and there is naturally the picture itself: the people, how they are dressed, there hairstyle, the cars, public places, or any other element.

Some months ago I bought a  Zeiss Ikon Tengor Box in which I found a film: a Kodak Verichrome Pan. The film was introduced in 1956 and the production of this film had stopped a few years ago. The only thing one can conclude from this is that the images can not be prior to 1956. The camera was bought from someone in Belgium so it is also probably the images I would find on the film would be out of Belgium somewhere.

When I developed this film I saw there were just two images on it, both almost identical,  of a little child. Seems out of the seventies, but not sure about that.

In another camera (an Ensign ful-vue) I bought in England I also found a film.

On it there was a picture of a woman and some shots outside with a mule. Not a clue of what year this might be, but still it has to be from later than 1948 (production date of the camera)

http://community.livejournal.com/foundfilm/

Ghosts in the landscape

I found a photo book in the sales yesterday and I am quite impressed by it:

Ghosts in the landscape. Vietnam revisited. By Craig J. Barber

The pictures in it (all pinhole landscapes) have something very intriguing.

From the back cover:

“After serving in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, photographer Craig Barber returns twenty-eight years later to a country that he first saw through  the eyes of combat. Haunted by the deaths he witnessed, Barber carries his memories of being eighteen with a taunting bull’s-eye painted on his helmet, the smell of smoldering bombs, and the cries of the dying back to Vietnam in order to put his ghosts to rest. In the Vietnamese countryside, he captures the healing landscapes with bomb craters turned into fish-rearing ponds and watering reservoirs, metal sections from former airstrip runways transformed into window grates, and shell casings functioning as fence posts.”

Some images:

In the video of the George Eastman House Jeanne Verhulst guides us through some of these pictures:

These pictures and also other work of this artist can be found on http://www.craigbarber.com

One again some context is added to this images by the story of someone retuning to a region he has known under complete other circumstances. It is not only the time context that plays a role here but also the fact that the transformation from soldier to photographer adds extra information. Once we know this we tend to look differently to these pictures.

Would we look differently if we would not know this context? For sure we would. We would admire the aesthetic qualities of these images and the wonderful addition the choice of using a pinhole camera as technique gives to the pictures.

There is more and more a tendency to give extra context to images we get to see. We date them, or note the location. I myself also give titles to my pictures, and in its essence that also is already giving a certain context to it.

one history

I found four pictures, depicting my grandfather. Three of them have a definitely kind of ‘important occasion’ character. The first one must have been taken around 1912 in Antwerp, 25 kms of Zandvliet, a little village where is parents were living. Probably this picture was taken at the occasion of my grandfathers first communion (catholic tradition). Apart of the shipmate outfit there is nothing depicting here anything that could be related back to who my grandfather was. Was he a shipmate? Certainly not.  His father was a farmer and it is just some fancy dressing for the occasion.  The only other elements in this picture are the chair, an often used object in the portraits then, and the gorgeous painted background with the nice fading effect of the light. Probably natural light was used. Most of the photographers in those days used studios with one or more walls of windows.
The is also the carpet, seemingly very baroque and the frivolous thing in the foreground is probably some kind of lion skin or something similar.

This picture must have been taken six years later. Probably another catholic tradition was the reason to take this one: the confirmation (in Dutch de plechtige communie en het helig vormsel). This is considered in the catholic tradition as a coming of age ritual. My grandfather is dressed up here as a boy, not  just a child anymore, ready to become a man.  Notice the hat on the ever present chair, a symbol of maturity as grown up men had to walk around  with a casket or a hat on. My grandfather also holds a little book, probably a catechism. No rug of an animal here but the most uncommon detail is the chair, this time, made of branches of a birch. This picture must have been taken after the first big world war, in 1919.

Here my grandfather (first of the left) is in a picture taken during his army service. Must be around 1926. These men all look much older than 18 and has you may have noticed, they all are holding a cigarette.

The obvious photo that now should have the next one would have been the one of my grandfathers marriage, but i did not find this one back.

The last picture is one where the special occasion element is unknown to me.

My grandfather is the man on the second row. The people in front of him are his parents.  My grandmother is the woman on the left, second row, my mother the girl on the left and her sister, my aunt, is the girl on the right.  Nothing to dervice from this picutre iether and maybe the date isnot exactly right but probalby this was taken in 1941, during worldwar II, and are we looking here also at a piece of territory, occupied by the Germans. What we see in the background is a part of the house my grandparents had build.

My grandfather was a carpenter. The odd thing is that is surname was also Carpentier, the french for carpenter.
But nothing is to be found of this information in this picture. I know the location and I know the building in the background is the work house my grandfather used to make furniture and coffins. All these picute have so little information, so only by adding soem information they become part of a story again.

There is for instance the story of my grandmother: she had a groceries store and at the back of the house she had another store she run: she made paint and varnishes on demand. And my grandmother was a very strong character. This picture was taken during wartime. and that’s so special:  just before  the occupation started she decided to give everything she had in her groceries store to all the people living near her house. She did want it to fal in the hand sof the enemy. And in the last year of the war she hide for several months – my grandfather was actually a little shy man who just had to do what she said- some british pilots in the stables at the back of her house. This while in the front of her house the germans came buying tobacco and other things.

Registering time

Every picture is a registration of what is happening  during a fraction of time and this registration  becomes related to a certain date and time, a moment, a certain event.  In everyday life we tend to associate what has been happening to certain pictures, although most of the time nothing special is happening in those picture, nothing so differently it would be the ultimate registration of an important moment. These kind of pictures have, contrary to pictures taken for photo journalistic purposes, in many cases just a very personal symbolic value.  And as long as a person or a group can associate them with certain recognisable elements or what has been happening, the date, hour, … we can put it on a time line we constructed ourselves: a string of images, ‘this was a visit to …”, “this is the birthday of …”, “this is picture taken somewhere in the week my father died …” It is a construction, not always visualised as such, but it helps in creating a personal history.  We tend to see it as a tool that helps us recollection events, sometimes it even gives a certain importance to what is/has been happening : “we need some pictures of this because it is a special event” could also be reversed: “it is a special event because there are pictures of it”.  It might be an interesting tread of thought to see how the proliferation of digital pictures in our everyday life is altering this now.

We all know the feeling of opening a box filled with old pictures. It is like opening a box full of what could be considered as precious moments. But all these elements are here separate landmarks, events that have happened and ended somehow. There seems not continuity in it.  So does this also intensifies our awareness of the shifting of time? Because we never seem to remember things as one solid picture.  We think back of what has happened in fragments, bits and pieces, not as well composed images that seems to make us aware of time itself. The reverse happens: we see a picture again and than start an association but the picture is most of the time not the association itself.  Maybe we construct time as a collection of fragmented elements and not as whole images. 

In this picturre I made I try to merge different fragments into one image. If fades into one another like our memory is merging all this to one recollection I have to a visit to Madrid.  But I have constructed this recollection of course myself. But by seeing this I get another stream also of recollections than I would have got without this picture. This is now how I try to get the awareness of the shifting of time into my pictures.

Here some other ones