PHOTOGRAPHS, HISTORY AND DIGITAL KINDNESS

My father's Red Room with heaps of history.

I told my father I would copy and digitally restore hundreds of color slides of the family, most of them from the 1950s and early 1960s. I surprised myself. It is not the sort of thing I volunteer to do very often.

I am not an unkind person and I do not lack compassion. But I always have been suspicious of acts of kindness and avoid them whenever I can. I do not volunteer or donate. I do not collect or distribute. I do not spend time with troubled youth or deliver hot meals to the elderly. I do not give money to ragged people who haunt street corners and live under bridges. I don’t hold anything against people who do those things, but I don’t do them.

However, I said I would do this. I justified it by telling myself it was an act of digital kindness. What harm could that do? A digital favor for a stubbornly un-digital old man.

Besides, photography is something my father and I share, but not in the way father's and sons usually share things. He didn't teach me how to take photographs - he wouldn't let me touch his camera. But he made me want to take photographs - because he wouldn't let me touch his camera. 

My first love was my father's camera. When I was a boy, it was the sexiest thing I knew of before I knew about sex. Looking at it made me want to touch it. Sneaking a hand into the deep right-hand bottom desk drawer where it was stored and touching it with the tips of my fingers made me feel like I wanted to do things I had no words to describe.

It was a Mercury II Univex 35mm rangefinder that shot half-size negatives and slides. It produced more than 60 tiny

images on a normal 36-exposure roll of film. With its aluminum body wrapped in black leather, it looked solid, efficient, German, but my father would not own a German camera. His wartime experience with precision German engineering, especially artillery, on an Italian beach south of Salerno in 1943 left no room in his life for anything German (when I bought a green Volkswagen - my first brand new car - in the late 1960s he would not ride in it). His Mercury II Univex was made in the no-nonsense postwar U.S.A. He loved that camera; I desired it. And the equipment that went with it: the tripod, the floodlights, the exposure meter. But they all were out of reach.

My father documented family trips, holidays (especially Christmases), birthdays, a visit to the grave of Stonewall Jackson, a trip into a coal mine where my mother was not allowed to go along because miners thought women were bad luck, a climb up Jockey’s Ridge (the largest natural sand pile on the east coast), mountaintops, lighthouses, beaches, my mother looking sexy in her black one-piece bathing suit, my baby sister naked and posed on a rug, my brother and sister splashing in the surf, me wearing an unfortunate pair of white pants called “clamdiggers” (Capri pants for boys; I remember they had a piece of white cotton rope for a belt) with which I wore white socks rolled down almost to my shoes; I was standing with my mother and sister in front of a large outdoor painting of Jesus somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina or Tennessee (I don’t have a clue where we were or why we were there; we were plain old Presbyterians and did not indulge in religious frou-frou of any sort; our church didn't even have stained glass windows). He took snapshots of all kinds of things all over the place and produced hundreds of Kodak color slides, which is what proud young men did to their wives and children in the 1950s.

Color slides required a hand-held viewer or a projector and a screen. They were a hassle to deal with and almost always ended up stored somewhere out of the way. Ours ended up in the hall closet with the sheets and towels. After many years, both our family and our slides began to degenerate, color faded and the smiles disappeared from some of the faces. A few faces were lost completely.

My father found that unacceptable. Those color slides were the holy relics of his faith in the past. He held onto that faith because people smiled back then and whatever happened since then didn’t turn out so well. He could not allow those old smiles to disappear. It would be a sacrilege.

He was not a historian. He hoarded the past, stored it in boxes and files stacked high in my old bedroom and in the

The Red Room leaks to the hall.

hallway just outside the door. He called it the red room and spent hours and hours there searching and labeling, ordering and reordering the world to his satisfaction. He was a missionary of his version of the past, preaching it to anyone who would listen. Sometimes he was entertaining, other times he didn't know when to shut up. 

Old color slides and old men both become problems, but the color slides are easier to fix. 

So I told my father I would be glad to run the slides through my scanner/copier and do what I could to restore the digital images. I would burn them onto CDs and send them to him. He agreed and sent me four boxes full of slides.

My wife keeps me supplied with electronic ways to amuse myself. I have computers, printers, various music devices, speakers, a turntable for digitizing our record collection, software, hardware, cameras, terabytes of storage. It’s sexy stuff and it makes my fingers tingle. She also bought me a very nice scanner/copier. It is the machine that lured me into kindness.

I thought it would be fun ( the truth is I am as suspicious of “fun” as I am of “kindness”). For a while it was. Those happy people on the beach, in the mountains, around the Christmas tree. Then it wasn’t. The faces began to lose their cheer as the 1950s passed into the 1960s. I began to see the misery and hardship that was coming sooner than anyone suspected. I could see it beginning at the corners of people's mouths, in their postures and the way their glances avoided the lense as time passed, the visible way lightheartedness became heavier with time. I know he didn't see it that way.

I finished the job and sent him the digital images. All of them. And I always thought I would return the slides to him but I never did. When I returned from his funeral I saw the boxes of slide-filled carousels on the shelf in my office closet. Inside each box are his tidy notes about which slides are most important to him, which ones to fix first. I will leave them there - at least for now - and eventually I'm sure I will look at them again and maybe I will add a note about which slides are most important to me for one of my own children to find. But I will never go through the boxes of slides searching for images of him. There are very few. He rarely let other people touch his camera.

As he grew old he would not allow anyone to touch the way he needed to see the world either. He preferred his past unsullied by subsequent reality. I live in an ever-sullied world. It is a difference we never resolved. But versions of history vary. He got what he needed from those old slides; I suppose I get what I need too.

 

My father photographs grandchildren on my sister's front lawn.