Apparently I've been spending more time with my parents as I've got even more old photos now. As indicated on the print, this was taken at Al Mercur's Nut House, probably sometime between 1937-1942. I have no idea where the Nut House was located (google turned up nada), possibly in the Beaver Valley of western PA, because those are my father's parents seated in the bottom right hand corner of the photograph and those were their stomping grounds. Good to know that it wasn't always bitterness and acrimony between those two before their divorce.
But anyway, old photos offer such a unique window into a time and place that we can barely even dream of. The first time I was really struck by that thought was while looking at some of Mathew Brady's work of the carnage at Gettysburg. I couldn't let go of the thought that once this was reality. That a man stood there with a camera and plucked these scenes from the world and preserved them in a way that a drawing or a painting could never achieve. Photography doesn't echo us, it is us.
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