My Oma and Opa

I think that it is interesting that there aren’t more personal photographs posted; I see now that there are a couple, but it is still surprising. I wonder if this is because others might think about “image” the same way I do? For some strange reason, I seemed to have dis-associated the word “image” from “photograph” --strange because they should be synonymous (wait--should they?). But I wonder if “image” represents something more formal (somehow different) whereas the home photograph, of course, is a vernacular image. Do they operate differently? If so, how? If they do operate differently, do we require different grammars for these different types?

Anyway, the image I chose is a photograph of my grandparents. I like it for many reasons: it is a photo of two people who were an important part of my early life and so, of course, it has sentimental value; it is a bit of a curiosity because it shows my grandparents as young people (my guess is that they are about my age in this photo, perhaps a bit younger) and also because it shows me a past that is relevant to me but didn’t involve me (my odd experience with this photo is much like Jennn’s—a photograph of people I know/but don’t know).

My experience of this photo is strange; there seems to be, like Hill and Helmers suggest, different levels of time at work in my viewing but they are hard to articulate. It seems that a photograph like this represents a diachronical viewing since it is “an image that represents the past and was created in the past” but, beyond this, I’m not sure about the connections between personal/vernacular photos and time. Hill and Helmers’ example is a photograph operating on a national scale that lends itself well to the idea of synchronic and diachronic time, but I wonder if individual photographs operate in the same way. My experience seems to also involve a moving forward of time much like Berger suggests—from the past of this photo to its future (my present). Since I know the future of the people in this photograph, my time with it seems to move forward rather than back (as is the case with the Ground Zero Spirit photo). Berger says that a photograph “preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced by the supersession of further moments” (89). For Berger the photograph is separated from “continuous experience”—yet, in some way, this photograph is embedded in a personal experience that continues to have meaning (it is a story of my family after all) and relevance (because of this story I was born and was able to attend FSU and take Visual Rhetoric with Dr. Yancey.)

On top of all of this, the photo is something else: a puzzle much like Berger’s mysterious photograph of a man and a horse. This photo was discovered among my grandmother’s possessions following her death and, at that time, there was no one to corroborate the story “behind” the photograph—no date, no location, no identity of the photographer, nothing. So the story behind the image is pure speculation. However, with a bit of research, I’m pretty confident that the river behind them is the East River in New York since the bridge seems to be Hellgate Bridge. I also might be able to date the photograph within a few years: since they might be standing where the Robert F. Kennedy bridge now crosses the river, and since construction of it was begun in 1929, I can guess that this was taken in the mid-1920's. Again, speculation: meaning is half-present, partially discontinuous.