American Character - Family Photos

Having professed that the purpose of this blog is to explore the stories behind photographs, I'm pulling out some previously unpublished vintage images from the MojaveWest archive that have no recorded story to tell. For whatever reason, these images have become separated from the descendants of their former owners, and  thus any record of who is pictured, or any story about why the photo was taken, has been lost to time. But in that lack of a story, there is a new story, one that we perhaps project upon the anonymous characters shown, a perception of what we imagine it was like to live in their time.

Click on this, or the other photographs in this post, and stare for a few moments

into these faces. There is so much that is revealed. A husband and wife, 

and her parents, for whom life has been hard. Two boys, one who dreams of 

becoming a pilot, one whose shirt and tie seem incongruous with rumpled 

overalls. An itinerant trade hinted at by the lettering on the truck. And a dog, 

perhaps the only aspect of this whole scene that is timeless. 

In this new century, we have become a visual world, and practically everyone now has a camera of some sort, and just about every aspect of life gets shot - including many that probably shouldn't. Superstar photog Joe McNally once wrote, "Face it: every day, there are about 30 million billion digital pictures being taken. How do you make yours stand out?"* That, as I've already written, is the challenge.

But it wasn't always so. Once upon a time, cameras were large, bulky, and the singular realm of the professional. Then came Kodak and the Brownie, and suddenly the ability to record everyday life happening around you became possible to the amateur. The age of the snapshot was born. Dig through a pile of antique photos sometime, and you'll start to see a clear demarkation in time, separating the age of pro-only shooting (hallmarked by tin-types and a little later, by "cabinet photos") of the late 1800s/early 1900s and the snapshots of the 1920s and 1930s.

Pro photographers of that era, more often than not staged their images. Amateurs, on the other hand, captured unrehearsed moments in reality and time. What shines through so many times, though, is a profound sense of the character in the people imaged. Maybe it's just our perception, maybe it was because of the harsher times that they lived through, or maybe it was the honesty of the early snapshots, before people realized they could fool everyone and fake looking good. What ever it was, take a good, long look at these images and you'll start to see something remarkable. It is the character ingrained on their faces, chiseled there by the life they led, by life itself being fundamentally harder than it is today.

The California license plates say 1930. Dad - a milkman? - has
just come home from work, interrupting a game of baseball
played by his young sons. And how about that rumble seat?

As we stare into these windows of the past, though, there is a danger of deception, a fundamental trap of error that our brains fall into as we imagine their world. Like images we shoot today, they allow us to look through the eyes and with the perspective of the one person on the scene who remains unseen, the photographer. Their motives and thoughts in taking the shot might be guessed at from interpreting the outcome, but in reality remain forever veiled. But yet, what we see is not really how they saw it. In our daily life, we see things in - and our fancy digital cameras take images that reflect - the bold, vivid colors of real life. When we stare at a vintage photo, however, it's usually sepia or a best black and white. Look at enough of them and the brain gets tricked into imagining life during that era as somehow colorless, so much so that when we do come across some of the rare, early color images from those days, our mind sort of suffers a disconnect.

An interesting mental effect from this falsely monochromatic view of their world is the thought that somehow what they experienced is somehow less real than what we do. If anything, it was more so. Without our ultra-advanced climate control, summers were hotter, winters were colder. Sanitation and hygiene were different then, and thus were the everyday odors. But none of that comes through in a photo. And we conveniently forget about it, too.

A summer afternoon's visit to Grandma and Grandpa in Dad's new car?

So as you compose and shoot your next family snapshot, what story are you telling, and what story will be read into it 80 years from now by someone who has no clue who you were, but who is staring into your eyes trying to image what it was like to live in your time?

*From Joe McNally's The Hotshoe Diaries, an amazing book which should be required reading for anyone who picks up a speedlight and slaps it on a camera.