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.

100 Years: Happy Birthday, Grandma!

100 years ago today, my Grandmother Grace was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. The picture below is probably the earliest recording of her: it was taken at her grandparents house in SLC. It is also the oldest negative I have in my collection of family photographs. The portrait was taken on sized 132 film, and was likely one of the first photographs taken on my great-grandmothers Kodak Folding Pocket camera that took postcard sized photographs. I now have what few remaining negatives my great-grandmother shot with this camera, as well as the camera itself, which we think is still in working order (but I will know when I actually finish my test roll of film. More importantly though, I still have my grandmother.

My grandmother Grace, as a baby, in Salt Lake City, UT

As I pack my bags to head over the mountain range and see my extended family for a weekend of birthday festivities, the realization of how lucky I am strikes me again. I can still ask her to tell me stories of growing up on the pains in Alberta, Canada. Or about when the Columbia Basin Irrigation project started and her and her husband placed the irrigation system in their once dry farm in Quincy, Washington. I can ask her about what it was like to be a press photographer in the 1960′s, when the “old boys club” had barely begun to be questioned. I can ask her these things and have more answers I would ever had just by looking at old photographs and making educated guesses. So happy birthday, Grandma Grace! And here’s too many more.

How Hereditics Started

My grandmother, around age 3 in about 1914

I have spent all day immersed in pictures and names. Sorting and organizing almost one hundred years of photos and mementos in some sort of chronological order, labeling photos long forgotten with the names of those frozen in the frame, and retouching photographs that have lost their battle with the years and elements and bear scars of creases and fading. My eyeballs may fall out of my head at any given moment, and I have lost all hope that sanity will find me again today.

You see, I am in the throes of the project that is the precursor to what I have affectionately dubbed my “Hereditics” work. Next month marks my grandmothers one hundredth birthday, and as some sort of gift to her and others in the family, I have spent the last 3 weeks or so digging through boxes, sorting and scanning long stored photographs, negatives, slides, and other memorabilia my grandmother clung to through her life. Out of the thousands of photographs I have looked through, I am placing roughly one hundred in a book for her for her birthday. There are photographs her mother took from infancy to childhood, pictures my grandmother took of her family and adventures as a farmer and journalist and press photographer, and mementos spanning almost the entire twentieth century. The scope of the project overwhelms me, and the prospect of successfully showing one’s life condensed into 40 pages is daunting.

The facts are that the process is exhausting, and I feel like a jack hammer that is just starting to break through layer upon layer of concrete. I have also learned more about my family than I imagined I ever would. I am beginning to understand the complex relationships of the immensely strong women that make up my heritage. I am beginning to understand pathologies that run like rivers through generations and maladies that hold hands with extreme intelligence. I am beginning to understand how cycles are patterned and broken. My mental Rolodex has expanded to the point where I can name my great-aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and great-cousins and family friends and so-on and so-forth at any age, at just one glance. And I realize the information I have unearthed thus far I a droplet of water in a very large pond.

Somehow, I feel this book is only the beginning, and as I continue to scratch the surface in this anthropological journey, it may take me places I never could have dreamed of going. Before I can take off on the journey completely, I need to turn up The Pixies, tune out the outside word and finish this preemptive mini adventure by finishing this book!