Last week at the antique mall I came across a wad of mostly unlabeled photos, some probably as old as 100 years, but most looked like they were taken from the 1940s to the 1960s. I’d seen that kind of offering before, but always passed them up, often in favor of postcards.
The few with names or locations written on the back, I noticed, sometimes sold for as much as a dollar each, which is too much just for a picture of a long-ago stranger. But many of the anonymous photos were 25 cents each, so that encouraged me to buy a handful at that price.
Of those I bought, I like this one best. Hard to go wrong with a mother and child.
Of course, that’s just an assumption. Could be an aunt and niece, for example, or unrelated people, though that doesn’t seem likely. From the looks of them, I’d put the image sometime in the ’40s, perhaps the late ’40s.
An unidentified image of this kind makes me wonder. What were their names? Where did they live? How is it that their picture ended up in a for-sale bin in an antique mall in greater Chicago in the third decade of the 21st century?
If I’m right about the date, the child was on the cutting edge of the baby boom, assuming they are Americans. After all, the baby boom started about then with actual babies being born, and so there’s a fairly good chance the child is still alive, and even a very slender chance the woman is. But if so, why don’t they have their picture?
Unanswerable questions. All I really know is that I have the picture now, and ran it through my image-editing software, as I’ve done with more familiar images before. Add a little color, for instance.
Interesting how recognizable the figures are in the next one, even if you’d never seen the unretouched image, though I suppose we’re all primed to look for patterns that look like faces and bodies.
Kaleidoscope-style is next. It occurred to me I didn’t know who invented the kaleidoscope, so I looked it up. Though there were antecedents, it seems that Scottish inventor David Brewster devised its modern form in the mid-1810s, and coined the word. (Greek, beautiful + shape + look).
Much more abstract.
Yet we still see human figures, more or less, especially at a distance.
This is so cool. They could never have imagined at that moment that someday a stranger would come into possession of the photo and apply 21st century editing to it.
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