The Strange Lure of Other People’s Photos: Revisited
Every few weeks, I think about an article that was in the New York Times Magazine in 2020. It’s called The Strange Lure of Other People’s Photos by Bill Shapiro. When I get a chance, I reread it or share it with a friend and every time that experience hits me a little differently. Sometimes, the article seems poetic. Other days, it conveys the starkest existentialist truths there are. This summer, I was in a used bookstore and there was a shoebox of old pictures for sale, each one for a dollar. These were mostly vintage, some black and white, and all populated by people who are probably long gone. As I leafed through the pile, the themes of that same article were replaying in my head. “One day…” my inner voice told me, “this might be you!” I wonder about that sometimes when I save something to the cloud or browse social media, how a few things remain years after we’re gone — the joyous, tragic, and mundane moments of life preserved as out-of-context snapshots that a stranger could only guess at or project stories onto. Later at a totally different used bookstore, I bought a fantastic book from 1955 for four dollars called The Family of Man, which declares itself to be “the greatest photographic exhibition of all time” with over 500 pictures from 68 countries. And it really is a wonderful collection of humanizing portraits from around the world. This copy even had a personal inscription to Elmer with a nice note from Lois and Peggy, whoever they are. But those smiling faces throughout the book? Elmer and the inscribers? All lost to time now. And as disheartening as that might feel, to actually see the breadth and depth of people’s lives is a reassuring thing. It’s a small monument to them and to all of us. It shows that we were here.
