2022-04-17
A Photographic Archive
The late poet and essayist Mary Oliver produced a little book titled Our World. The book is a collection of photographs taken by her partner, Molly Malone, combined with some of Oliver’s prose and poetry to draw a picture of their lives. The images in the book are mainly from the 1950s and 60s. A few of them are famous people, but most are of friends or “street photography” style pictures of strangers Malone took while living in Europe before the two met.
I like looking at books of old photographs, especially if the pictures are people and locations I don’t know. These images, like all images, have stories inside them, but if you don’t know the people or the places, you must use imagination to build your own narrative. Who the people are and what they did with their lives, and whether they are still alive all become matters of conjecture. Ironically, looking at unfamiliar faces in old pictures stimulates a sense of connection with all of humanity for me. The different countenances on the faces suggest emotions any viewer can feel.
I’ve kept this blog for a few years and made nearly 100 videos without a clear direction for the enterprise. Looking through Mary Oliver’s little book makes me think I should use my blog and my videos as an archive for my pictures. Adding short essays describing what I think and read about when I’m not taking photographs will build the story of who I am (was) for anybody who finds the pictures — a modest but vain ambition for immortality by an otherwise easily forgettable character in the human saga.
Monte