As much as I love them, old photos make me nervous. My own and other peoples. Especially other peoples. Today, I spent some time sorting through a huge batch of vacation photos that a faculty member had picked up somewhere, intending them for a project that just never happened. So he passed them onto me. I foraged for some good collage/art possibilities, and found a really cute vintage Hallmark floral bag, but as I tossed the majority of the pics--various women posed in front of monuments and scenic vistas (but did keep the vistas and the monuments alone for artmaking) I felt the same weight on my chest that I feel when I look at family photos of my own. That it's suffocating to think of the detritus of our lives--what we leave behind, where it goes, what happens to it. The women were old in the 70's--now they are surely dead, so it felt weird tossing them into the trash with the days other detritus, coffee cups and sandwich wrappers--somehow sacriligious, even though I've no desire to keep them unless they are useful.
When I was 8, my grandmother died, and in her house was about a foot tall mountain of snapshots going back decades, that my mother and aunt sat and sorted through one stifling summer afternoon. Many went into albums that still sit in my Dad's house today. Others were split up among relatives. Even more, however, were tossed in the trash or on top of a fire or lost in the shuffle. When I volunteered to help clean up that flooded farm house in Kaskaskia after the 93 floods, I remember the horrible feeling of scraping family photos caked in mud from the floor boards of the 2nd floor, where the water had been halfway up the wall. What to do with all this--what we keep, what we leave behind,. What matters to no one else but us, and after we're gone. ?
Years ago, my aunt gave me a stack of cool victorian cabinet cards she'd been sent from relatives in Nebraska, where she and my mother were born. There were some young pics of my grandmother in the 20's and 30's among them, but most of the people were unrecognizeable and unknown..maybe a trace of resemblance at most--a set of brow, a curve of lip that echoed through my great grandmother, but little else. She gave them to be to do "something artsy" and they eventually, without their actual heads, became he unusual creatures pieces. At first, I debated collageing on the photos themselves. On one hand, it would ruin them. On the other, no one much cared, least of all my aunt..The originals, tucked somewhere in my studio even now, will one day be inconsequential to whoever stumbles across them. I wound up reproducing them on cardstock and then working with them. But it scarce matters. Ultimately, they'll ed up in the trash sooner or later.
The strange thing about being childless I suppose is knowing that my legacy, whatever that is, dies with me. Some day, I'll grow old and die and people, probably strangers, will throw the bulk of my things in the trash --the poems, the artwork, the random bits of my life I've collected. This makes me hurt. it makes me heavy in a way I can't quite put my finger on. My dad & sister were pretty quick about dealing with my mother's things after her death--alarmingly so, but it was probably necessary mental health-wise--the closet full of clothes, her jewelry box, a linen closet stuffed with half burnt candles and semi-filled bottles of lotion. Her presence is still very real in the house--the art she chose for the walls, the furniture, the photos, her dishes. . But at the same time, she is also more absent--and in a way that has nothing to do with her physically missing. But who can hold on to ghosts? Or maybe ghosts are all we have?
While I've purloined a lot of photos and scanned them for social-media purposes over the years, I have only one photo album in my apartment, mostly filled with images taken from my first years in Chicago before the world went digital. I also have a sizeable stack of yearbooks, journals, and scrapbooks, but the photo albums for the most part are in my parents' house. The weight of the seems to much.
One project that I've always thought would be cool would be to hunt down a bunch of stranger's family photos and create my own story from them. I know other artist and writers who have done this (Jaime Zuckerman's Alone in this Together, published by dgp a couple years back is a great example.) One of our Aof R artsist from a few shows ago liked to alter photos found in antique stores with his own monster illustrations and then slip them surreptitiously back into the stores to be found by others.
