The First Story

People make pictures for many reasons and purposes.  Some are made for artistic expression, to capture a moment in time, to communicate an architectural or fashion creation. Many make pictures to tell a story.  I spent part of last week out of town making images to continue a story I began to see last summer. 

When finding and documenting a story, it should reveal itself to you.  It should throw your intentions out the window, taking you where it means you to go.  Last week the story I was working on took me in a direction I was not expecting it to go.  The story that last summer began in black and white hit the saturation slider on me this past week and spoke in color that won’t be ignored.  As I begin to work on the images, a re-evaluation will take place.

Some stories can be captured and told in a single image.  Some stories are too complex for a single image.  The story I made progress on last week will be an essay of many images strung together to tell the story of a town and more broadly, a region.  I still have work to do, more images remain to be made.

Some stories have a complete narrative - a beginning that sets the stage, a point of drama and a resolution.  But the photographer works in the moment and as moments pass removed from the photographers lens, some parts of the story will forever be elusive.  A photographer’s story may raise as many questions as it answers, pose an immediate point of drama that remains forever unresolved.  Today I am going to share a story which does just that.

This story I shot long ago, during grad school chasing a diversion on a fall evening.  It was made with Kodachrome 64, most likely on the Rikoh KR-30, probably with the 28 to 105 macro zoom.  To the best of my recollection, it was the first time I ever strung multiple images together to tell a story.  Three images:  Two bookmarks that propose the dramatic element and one to connect them.  None of the images provide resolution.  To this day I wonder how the unseen actors of the drama fared in the disaster that befell.  I will never know.

Holocaust

PS - These images were scanned many years ago with more primitive equipment. In the upcoming weeks I plan to purchase a more modern scanning device to better render these and many other images from my film archive.