"The Photograph Album"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The Photograph Album”

February 4, 2023

 

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a

moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

                                                                                                    Attributed to Karl Lagerfeld (1933-2019)

                                                                                                    German fashion designer, artist, and photographer

 

Photograph albums have gone the way of hand-cranked auto windows, phonographs, dial phones, carbon paper, and VCRs. But they will be missed more than those other 20^th Century inventions; for the latter have been replaced by improved products, while viewing photos on a smart phone, iPad, or computer is not the same as leafing through a photo album, pausing over a fond memory, or scuttling past one less memorable.

 

Photos contain stories of our past – our childhood and that of our parents and grandparents, remembrances of friends and special occasions, of the trips we took and the homes we lived in. As the rubric states, they capture a moment from which a story can be spun. They keep us anchored to a known past as we head toward unknowable shores.

 

These albums abound in our home, and I am happy they do. Amid the books, papers, and tchotchkes in our library lie twenty-five of them. Of assorted sizes, they record our fifty-nine years of marriage, along with glimpses of our parents and grandparents. They are treasures we will pass on. The earliest is a scrapbook (dated 1947), which has scribblings of mine, pictures cut from magazines, including an ad for Schlitz, “the beer that made Milwaukee famous,” an odd item to have collected at age six, as neither of my parents drank beer, and I was hardly a guzzler. Another album has photographs I took in the summer of 1955, mostly of my siblings and horses around our home in Peterborough, but there are also photos from the 4^th of July in Wellesley, MA; the Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut; New York’s Bronx Zoo; Washington, D.C., and from my grandmother’s home in Madison, CT. I had forgotten that I had traveled so much that summer.

 

Among the two dozen albums are a dozen “Apple” books. One is of Caroline’s 70th birthday; another of climbing Mount Washington in 2007, when grandson Alex was six; a third is of a trip to China in 2008, when I went as a guest of son Edward who was on a business trip. But most are of a “year in review,” in which we look at grandchildren, and watch as they grow older.

 

There is an album of photos from our wedding in 1964 – formal ones in black and white, with candid shots in color. Among the latter is a photo of my sister Mary and her husband Bob Gregg. Mary, who at the time was pregnant with her first child, died 24 years ago. Her husband died six months ago. Memories flood back and tears well. There is an album of our daughter’s wedding. Linie (short for Caroline) married Bill Featherston twenty-six years ago this June at St. Ann’s in Old Lyme, with the reception at our home. As I page through these albums, I blink back tears, remembering so many who have since died, but also recalling the joy of those special days and the love and closeness I felt. Other albums show our sons’ weddings in Palo Alto and Buffalo, each special in seeing them and their brides in the flowering of youth and love.

 

Our honeymoon was delayed almost a year. I finished college in February and had a job with Eastman Kodak starting in June, so Caroline and I took $2,000.00, bought round trip tickets to Paris and a copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. We rented a VW “bug,” and took an eleven-week trip through southern Europe. It was memorialized in an album, which also includes the map we followed. There are photo albums of our childhoods and even those of our parents and grandparents. Looking at those who have been gone for so long, I am reminded that those who were my family had eyes that saw, ears that heard, voices that spoke, and arms that hugged. The world was as real to them as it is to us. There are albums of the houses in which we lived, and of ones we remember from our childhood. There is even an album showing scenes from my 40^th, 50^th and 60^th birthdays, with amusing comments from a neighbor. Each was a milestone; then I felt the passing decades. Now I realize how young I was.

 

But most of the albums are of our children through those wonderous years of their growing up. Twenty-seven years marked the time from when our first child was born until the youngest graduated from college. In any parent’s life, those are the most important years. Children grow from utter dependency to complete independency. It is a marvel and a miracle, and it has been happening for tens of thousands of years, over thousands of generations and will happen as long into the future as we can imagine. 

 

These albums are a record of our lives. They will be passed to our children and grandchildren, for whom I hope they bring as many pleasant memories as they have given us.