Seeing Is Believing

I spent the weekend with my folks and on Memorial Day we browsed through their photo albums. Since taking this job I have learned much about seeing an image, learning from a photograph. What are the visual and historical cues in that snapshot? The tight plaid skirt and matching cowl-necked jacket, the ruffled lamp shades, the amber-colored glass ashtray perched on a wood stand. It's 1959, and my parents are young parents themselves.

Then on to another kind of plaid, the polyester plaid of the seventies' leisure suit and my dad, a man most comfortable in wash pants and a heavy t-shirt, is sporting white slip-ons as well, as if he can pull this all off as easily as Sammy Davis Jr.

One of my favorite photographers, Ernst Haas (who began his photography career in the '40s), says this: "With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will." (photo by Erich Hartmann—Magnum)

I read a good post filled with found pictures by the blogger Eden Marriott Kennedy, who has been clearing out her father's things after his death. She found treasured photos and saved ephemera beneath her father's other more quirky holdings, including a big wad of stolen Dairy Queen napkins.

"A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?"

"There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are."

"My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right."--all quotes by Ernst Haas

I've been making do without my digital camera, which I still haven't fixed from back when I couldn't seem to hold on to things. Did I lose as well the thing that helps me hold on to things? That camera?

"Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see."

As a writer I do my own framing all the time. But I do love images. And I do love the stories they tell.

It was a sweet day, pouring over pictures with my parents looking over my shoulders. We traced their beauty and youth. We laughed about caught poses and facial expressions. We touched the corners of the old black-and-whites and then passed them over to each other. My dad and I went into town and he scanned and enlarged my mom's graduation picture. He felt bad that the scan picked up the cracked bend in the small wallet portrait. She had written in pen "Sharon, 1957," and given it to him before she graduated. So he could remember her.

NYC, 1958 -- A kiss on a train platform at Grand Central Station. Getty Images. Photo by Ernst Haas.