17 November 2012

Book du jour - three generations

Off and on, the "eyes" book is developing. It's threatening to veer off course, with the idea of children thinking their "self" is invisible when they aren't meeting someone's gaze, so I collected photos of my very young self either looking at the camera or not ... but that this something for another time.

Also I found more photos of my grandmother, my mother, and my younger self. Here we all are as brides - 
They are looking out at us - I wonder what they were thinking... I am looking away; can I remember what I was thinking? How have subsequent events changed my memory of what was going on in my head then? Did my mother and grandmother look at their own photos, in later years, and were they able to remember who they were then? Why didn't I ask them that, when I had a chance?

For me, looking at these photos, into their mute eyes, brings so many memories - so many rehearsals of old memories. And some surprises, due to my own imperfect memory. I went to check on the date of Oma's wedding - and found that what I thought was a wedding photo - wasn't. This is the wedding photo, 1910 -
so this photo
must have been taken some time later, probably after 1919. (Note the change in mustache styles!) Unfortunately the real wedding photo - of which I have only a web version of a photo of the original photo - contains too few pixels for the eyes only to be used in a print version. Which is sort of appropriate - mists of time and all that - but not all that good to look at really.

For completeness' sake, here are the other wedding photos, one post-war and one post-hippy -
1947
1971


1 comment:

The Idaho Beauty said...

I really do get mesmerized by old family portraits. I've done a similar thing with photos of my mother, cropping to just the eyes. I was stunned by how similar my crops look to yours, although I shouldn't have been. I too ran into the not enough pixels problem on a few scans - I will take your comment to heart.

DO love the 1971 version of you - classic!