Found Photographs

Full disclosure—I just read an article in the Times that inspired me to do this.  A favorite pass time of mine for a long long time has been sifting through thousands and thousands of slides, negatives, and photo prints at flea markets and junk stores looking for treasures. From New York City to Rome, Paris and anywhere I stumble in to in between, there I find myself—standing for hours on end, neck craned up at the nearest light source, holding up slide after slide, letting the light shine through—looking for magic.  Photographs from a simpler time.  Photographs of people and pets and planes and recognizable buildings and eyebrow raising moments.  Over the years I’ve printed and framed one or two, but I’ve mostly kept these photographs to myself, studying them every so often to the point I’m so familiar with them that I feel like I was there when they were taken.  Or that I even took them myself.

But I didn’t. And I don’t know these people. But somehow looking at these is always comforting. And whoever took these photos had no idea that they would impact somebody they never met. And I like the idea of keeping these people and moments alive, never to fade away.

I’ll end this with a quote from the aforementioned article. The last paragraph incase you don’t get all the way through:

“The neuroscientist and author David Eagleman has written that we all die three deaths: “The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” I would say there’s a fourth: the moment the last remaining picture of you is seen for the final time. These found photographs not only remind me of this delicate thing we run both toward and away from — time — but they also hold something else. The humbling, steadying truth that, one day, that’s all we’ll be: a photo.”

Here are a few favorites from my collection: