Great Old Photos #1

K and I are currently in the process of creating a wistful, comic "growing up" slideshow to play at our wedding and get the guests all weepy. Let's play get the guests!

I've going through thousands of old photographs and come across some real gems. It's not always the content of these pictures that is spectacular (although the content is often remarkable), but it's something else, something invisible that makes these pictures really stand out for me.

I'm starting a short series in order to wrestle with these photographs.

Here is Great Old Photo #1

The scan of this picture doesn't really do it justice. The blacks look kind of washed out and the whites are dirty. Try to view the screen at an angle to really bring the contrast back to make the whites sparkle and the blacks black.

I love this photo for a lot of reasons, mostly because of its noiry starkness. Mom and Dad are so young here (I think it is 1965, probably Christmas by the look of the Christmas cards attached to the wall) -- Dad would be 29, Mom 25. They would have been dating for about three months at this point. It looks like a house they are in, and not an apartment, which could make it the house of Dad's brother-in-law, Uncle Louie. Or perhaps it is the house of some random couple hosting a party. It is hard to say.

The first thing one notices is the bright flash perfectly positioned in the mirror on the far wall. This is what makes the picture so wonderful. Imagine if the flash did not exist. It would still be a decent photograph but it would lose its interrogative shock. We see the very thing that is causing Mom to open her mouth in protest, a bright flash illuminating their secret (risque?) embrace. She is in his lap and his tie is rumpled. The rest of the house is dark and quiet. Dad's smirk puts him in league with the faceless photographer, but Mom's mouth is forming the shape of admonishment. She has seen the photographer approaching and is yelling at him to stop. This sense of fun is what takes the picture out of the realm of Weegee, although the aesthetic is the same. They are up to no good, and so is the photographer.

I love the beautiful square frame, something usually reserved for portraits and medium-format photography. Mom's face, which is foregrounded and receiving the glare of the flash full-on, is in the virtual center of the frame. They have too much headroom and the camera is tilting dynamically to the left. Do we feel tense because we have seen Orson Welles movies and others like it and we have learned that angled frames are a harbinger of bad things to come? Or do we innately feel tense because vertical lines are not vertical anymore and all is not well and right with the world? There is no time to set up this shot; the photographer is moving forward and the horizon is jostled. It is not so much composed as it is aimed. I imagine the camera continuing to tip counter-clockwise, becoming more and more dutched. Mom's head remains in the very center of this image as the stark world whirls chaotically around her.

A conical lamp hovers above her. It looks like a party hat that has just popped off her head, due to the sheer force of her surprise.