Gram & Grandpa's Slides
When my grandmother died I inherited all the family slides because, well, I asked for them. When visiting my grandparent’s house as a kid in the seventies I would often forgo playing with friends or riding bikes and sit for hours with a little handheld viewer and stare at all the Kodachromes and Ektachromes and Agfachromes they had taken over the years.
Most of them were vacation and family pics of little interest to anyone but my grandparents, all snapped by either Gram or Grandpa sometime from the late 50’s to the early 70’s. They were the iPhone pics of their time. Except instead of scrolling through a hundred shots with their thumb, they had to set up a cumbersome projector and screen and make a concerted effort to view them. To me this made them all the more special.
I didn’t personally take any of these photographs, but I curated some of my favorites out of the hundreds that were left to me. I made my choices not so much because of the subjects, although everyone in them has been dear to me and almost all have passed now, but because of the delightful framing and composition of each shot, whether done deliberately or by chance or simple instinct. They read almost like folk art; composed with an authentic and natural sensibility.
Where my grandparents chose to point the camera and how they composed some of these shots just makes my little photographer’s heart happy, and I love these pictures today as every bit as much as I did when I was a kid.
Read MoreMost of them were vacation and family pics of little interest to anyone but my grandparents, all snapped by either Gram or Grandpa sometime from the late 50’s to the early 70’s. They were the iPhone pics of their time. Except instead of scrolling through a hundred shots with their thumb, they had to set up a cumbersome projector and screen and make a concerted effort to view them. To me this made them all the more special.
I didn’t personally take any of these photographs, but I curated some of my favorites out of the hundreds that were left to me. I made my choices not so much because of the subjects, although everyone in them has been dear to me and almost all have passed now, but because of the delightful framing and composition of each shot, whether done deliberately or by chance or simple instinct. They read almost like folk art; composed with an authentic and natural sensibility.
Where my grandparents chose to point the camera and how they composed some of these shots just makes my little photographer’s heart happy, and I love these pictures today as every bit as much as I did when I was a kid.
