Pictures

We recently hosted a family barbecue. As I usually do, I took out my digital camera and started shooting at whatever moved or looked like an interesting grouping. The kids run around so much, most of my pictures are puzzlingly vapid. Especially in digital photography, there is a delay between when you depress the shutter and when the image is impressed on the electronic sensors so that I get many shots that come out like the drawing of cows eating grass, where the grass is already eaten and the cows have left.

Roll back the scene about 80 years or so. I have a large shoebox filled with photographs taken by my father from the late twenties through the seventies. The pictures taken after 1965 don't interest me too much because I have my own pictures of the same events and because I have living memories of those depicted in the photos, and, although interesting in their own right (see how young we were) they don't convey the same sense of continuity I get from the pictures of people I never knew.

There are pictures of my dead cousins dancing at some celebration or other, pictures of my aunts' weddings, random pictures of dinners and hikes and groupings of people who were related to me before I was born but didn't manage to be contemporary with me, and also pictures of young people whom I did manage to meet when they were older. I think about all of them, these personalities flitting in and out of my consciousness, as I go through the piles of photos. I think, here are people, like me, with likes and dislikes loves and hates hopes and disappointments triumphs and failures. They are mostly, if not all, gone now and we have taken their place. I long for the opportunity to interact with them.

Back to the twenty-first century. I sent my children a random shot of four of my adult children at the above mentioned barbecue; one is asleep in a chair, the other three are busily engaged in eating a corn or a hot dog concentrating on the matter in hand and oblivious to each other, sort of like Hopper's "Soir Bleu." I asked them what they think one of our descendants would think when coming across this picture in 50 years.

Here are some of their answers;

"why would anyone have saved THIS picture?"
"why would anyone have taken this picture?"
"what's Dr. Brown soda?"

I guess they don't think like me.