The Meaning Of Something Found

Beach Girls, Not A Polaroid


I discovered a site today devote to found Polaroid photographs.  They are anonymous in that the people aren't identified, and there is no context for the pictures.  Which is what makes found polaroids so engrossing:  You are tasked with writing up a caption for any image you choose.  I picked one of an old woman, and while I sipped my first cup of coffee this morning, wove a short story (250-350 words preferred) of wonder.  She and her setting looked completely unremarkable, but as we all know, looks can be deceiving.
I suppose the meaning of something found is whatever we ascribe to it, barring the things ability to simply define itself.

As Time Goes By

People Who Are Now Dead, Kissing 1928

People and their hormones, it's like lemmings off a cliff. I have no idea who these people are in the picture, or what the 'S' stands for on the man's tank top. I'm willing to venture that it doesn't stand for Superman, particularly since the character hadn't been conjured yet.
I'm still rooting through my grandfather's old photographs, obviously.

Battle of Lake Erie

Brig Niagara, 1928

Just going through some of my grandfather's old photographs. He was something, that one.

That's Some Horse

On the back of this picture in a hand I don't recognize is written "McCall". Taken in the early to mid 1920s, this picture was with a group taken when my grandfather was still attending Evans City (PA) High School. Oh, and that's not my grandfather in the picture. I have no idea what the "McCall" on the back denotes since it's not a family name in our tree.

Al Mercur's Nut House

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.