The Accidental Titles

I’ve been taking a class on photo books for the last three months, and while I have been working on a hand-bound hardcover accordion book (more on that later) I became inspired and made two small paperback photo books.

The first title, The Cartography of Farmers’ Wives: Photography from 1915-1976, is a short paper-back book with sampling of photography from my great-grandmother and my grandmother. Many of the photographs are landscapes from eastern Washington, although there are a few portraits as well in this contemplative story of one families relationship with the land. I look at this book as a small meditation on a much larger project that I think will probably take me the next 2-3 years to complete. Now that I know I can complete a small project with some of the information and items I have in this collection of family history that has been handed to me, I feel ready to embark on the larger journey.

The second book, A Traveling Song is a small paper-back of Hipstamiatic images I took on my phone on the road-trip my wife and I took when we moved across the country from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington, in 2009. We pretty much drove straight through, and most of the images were taken from the car window while passing through middle America.

More Glances Into the Past

If you’ve read any of my posts, you’ll know that I’m in the middle of mucking about in a bunch of old family photos. The cool thing about my family photos is that I have thousands (yes, really, thousands) of prints and negatives going back 100 years. Both my great-grandmother, and my grandmother were both shutterbugs, and my grandmother kept all the negatives she could.

They both also took a lot of landscape photographs, and candid images of their families (as opposed to posed group shots), and that is primarily what I have been working with as of late.

One of the reasons I am starting to work with these images is because I am taking a photobook class. I signed up for the class mainly for the technical information (i.e. what makes a successful photobook? what is the history? what makes a successful series of images? when is a photobook the best format? etc.) that will aid with the new publishing venture in the upcoming year, and for some inspiration (as the class is being taught by one of my favorite contemporary northwest photographers).

The difference between me, and most of the other students in the class, is that they have a clear concept of one specific book they want to create. I, on the other hand, want all the information, and to be able to pick peoples brains, and see what is going on in the world of photobooks currently. But seeing as making a photobook is part of the class, I am using some of these old photographs and making what I hope will be a quiet contemplation of the land that my family farmed from 1912 through the late 1960′s. It’s a good exercise in editing, and I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Mapping History

A few months ago I got the opportunity to start going through my grandmothers photographs. This collection is not your standard few albums with posed family snapshots, but thousands of prints, slides and negatives by both my grandmother and my great-grandmother. There are family portraits, landscapes, snapshots, and close-up shots of flowers. Starting to sort through these photographs that span my grandmothers entire life (and yes, I mean entire, as some of the oldest negatives in the collection were taken in Salt Lake City by my great-grandmother in 1911 when my grandmother was born), I find myself focused on the compositions and lines in the photographs, as well as the life lines that flow through the photographs and make up the stories of my mother’s, grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s lives.

So much of our lives have been shaped by where we live, and where we come from. My grandmother spent her childhood in the Alberta prairies, mapping the land her father farmed, and much later, helped her husband work their farm in the Wenatchee Valley. My grandfathers family had helped settle the land, and it was here, after 30 years of being a nomad that my grandmother settled down, as best as a nomad can, and found her roots.

So this is where I have started, somewhere before my beginning, in the middle of my grandmothers story, and near the beginning of my mothers story, following the maps of my family’s roots.

101 years old

Test shot with my great-grandmother’s Kodak Pocket Folding Camera. The Camera is 101 years old. 3 generations later and it’s in use again. It’s hard to explain how excited I really am about the the prospect of what can be done with this.

Share this:

 

Share this:

In my process of developing old film I’ve stumbled upon which spans the last ten years, I’ve found some cool stuff (and some not so cool stuff), but this rool of film left me speechless. I had found the last roll of film I ever took of my grandfather (my fathers father), during the last visit I ever saw him, wich was probably sometime in 2001. The whole roll of film is at the bowling ally, which was his favorite pastime, and the photos are blurry and incorrectly exposed, but somehow, they work.

Share this:

My Grandmother on the Canadian prairie in about 1916. This was one of the first negatives of her mothers that my Grandmother gave me, and it remains one of my favorites. Perhaps it’s that Lewis Hine like sentiment that I find so attractive.