Anyone else get that weird ominous feeling if they see the twin towers in any movie?
Fiona, yes.
I don’t tend to think about their mortality, I usually say “You know, right now there’s probably someone out there that would LOVE to have a picture of their great, great aunt Fanny, and I’m holding it right here in my hand. Too bad they’ll never see it.”
Whenever I go into antique stores and see those bins of old photographs I’m always a little meloncholy. I recall seeing one of two young people from the 30s on a beach, hugging each other, and looking like they were king and queen of the universe. One the back it said, “On the day he proposed.” So very sad that such a wonderful memory had to end up in a bin selling old photos for .25 each, or 5 for a $1.
Sorry, I just saw the post about the hold houses (of which there are a great many here in VA).
I always tell Susan, whenever we pass by them “You know, a family used to celebrate Christmas there - I wonder what it was like?”
We have a box of old photos of relatives from the early 20th century. I would ask, “Who’s this?” and nobody knew. How sad. And then I figure that’ll be me someday. Some distant relative finds my photo in a box and asks their parents, “Who is this?” and someone says, “I don’t know. Some distant cousin or something.” And then they toss my photo back in the box, to be forgotten.
Yes. On old episodes of “Law and Order: SVU” (the ones they show on USA), the Twin Towers are in the title sequence, and the episodes are circa 2000, a year before they were destroyed.
I just finished scanning and digitizing a complete album of ancestor’s photos, and it was a very strange experience. Because I was also retouching them and fixing flaws, I spend a long time with each photo. Hundreds in all, starting with my great-great-grandmother. Pictures from the mid-1800’s showing her as a young girl. I’d stare into her eyes for long periods of time as I corrected little flaws and scratches. As I’d go through the collection, she’d get older. Wedding photos, pictures of her young family, her as the matriarch, surrounded by teenagers, then eventually pictures of her funeral (open casket). Then moving on to each one of those little children who grew up around her, spending time with them as they each grew older, had their own families, grew old, and died.
Eventually, I got to my own grandparents and mother. Childhood photos, weddings, etc. The last collection of photos had my brother and myself in them…
It was a strange feeling. In some ways it was nice - made me feel a bit more connected to something larger than myself. It also made me understand why people become more interested in geneology as they get older - as your own life begins to wind down, the impulse it to try to connect it to something larger than yourself.
The other thing those pictures did was to make me feel as though life is very short. Seeing the high points of all those lives condensed into a few pages of photographs made them feel very…ephemeral. Seeing them blend into my own pictures makes my life feel like it’s rocketing past at breakneck speed.
My parents are dead, as are my grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles. I have two brothers, and we each have a different set of the family photographs, spread out by thousands of miles. We each have done our own restoration work on them and e-mailed the results to each other. However, there are some people in photos that we just cannot identify, and we can’t think of anyone still alive who could help us. Between the three of us, we’ve been able to give almost everyone a name, but in the generations before we were born, we now have no one to ask who some of these people in family photos were. That’s kinda sad.
Recently, I saw a picture of my maternal grandmother as a teenager, for the first time. It was amazing how much her grand-daughter looks like her. Not just a passing resemblance, the two people looked like identical twins born decades apart!
I love this thread. There’s something so wonderfully medieval about it. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?
The thing that always gets me thinking along these lines, though, are old books, especially if they have handwritten notes in them. One wonders who wrote them, and what moved them to do so.
When I was working on my MA thesis I did a lot of research on antitheatrical writing from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and since the library’s rare book room had a few of the best-known ones I used the original volumes. It was really pretty amazing to handle those four-hundred-year-old books and think about how old they were and who else might have read them. Though I doubt they would have approved of my purpose in reading them now… 
I think ya’ll are morbid. I *never * think of these things. 
Of course, seeing how many people apparently do, it occurs to me *I’m * the odd one out. :smack:
I said this out loud while looking at a picture from 1904 with School Children and I said wow all those Kids are dead or very close to it…but I was thinking about also how these kids were the same as kids today but now they are dead or really old.
I will look through picture albums from when I was a kid, or when my parents were, and there are all these people I don’t know. Sometimes they’re just distant relatives or friends I never met as an adult and just don’t recognize. Usually they’re just people in the background—behind us at Disney World or milling around at my graduation. And it makes me wonder, how many photo albums am I in? How many people have my picture on their desk—standing right behind their wife or kid or dog?
There’s an episode of Seinfeld about this. George Costanza realizes he’s in the background of his boss’s family beach photo. He has to figure out a way to airbrush himself out of it before his boss, Kruger, sees because he was the one who yelled at Kruger’s kids that day.
Every time I watch the opening credits to “Sex and the City.”
My wife and I are catching up on the episodes now that they’re on DVD.
In addition to the creepy “they’re all dead” feeling, there’s another feeling I get from looking at old photographs, like in Luc Sante’s book “Evidence.” Sometime around 1910, the New York City police department acquired a camera, which they used to record death scenes.
Shot of dead body here. Not blood showing.
For some reason, some shots were taken from above, leading to some strange images
And I think about those people, what their lives were like and how they met their end, and how the sum of all we know about them is found in this picture. They were one of millions living in the city at that time, living anonymous lives, and remembered solely for this.
pesch, the photographer Weegee did some photos like that. Some of his work, in addition to that first photo you linked to, were shown briefly in the movie Road to Perdition, hanging on the walls of the apartment where Jude Law’s photographer character lived.
It’s very much the same as seeing pictures of soldiers marching to the front in The Great War. They are already dead.
Even creepier: You see a lot of photos of babies from that time period. The vast majority of those babies were dead at the time the picture was taken. Sometimes it’s really obvious, like when they drew eyes over the eyelids on the negative to try to make them look alive.
Whoa there Little Bird, you’re freaking me out.
I do all the things mentioned in this thread. I often catch myself looking up at large, non-descript appartment buildings, realizing that there are hundreds of people living in there, all with lives of their own, dreams of their own, memories of their own…who are they? How did they end up here? Are they wondering the same thing about me as I walk past their window?
We have a lot of them in the museum in which I work. With many of them, the baby just looks like it’s sleeping-- you wouldn’t even realize that the baby is dead unless you were told beforehand.
It greatly depended on the skill of the photographer. They were usually called to the parents’ home to take the photo (of course) and the child was either posed on a sofa, or held in the mother’s arms. Often, the mother is not readily apparent in the photograph, because she’s been mostly cropped out. You may think that a lump is just a fold of cloth, but it’s really the woman’s arm. Sometimes, the entire image of the mother is included, and these are honestly the saddest pictures I have ever seen. The agony in those women’s eyes is heartbreaking.
Sometimes, the photo is framed with a lock of the baby’s hair on the back. Some of them were made into brooches or lockets. I imagine that a lot of these photos may have been a bit comforting to the parents because the child looks so sweet and peaceful-- like a little sleeping angel, in some cases.
Realize that the picture of the dead infant was most likely the only picture of the child that the parents had. It wasn’t common practice to take celebratory photos of mother and child after the birth, or when arriving home for the first time, as it is today.
Of course, children weren’t the only subjects of mortuary photographs. We have quite a selection of pictures of adults laid out in their coffins. In these pictures, it’s very, very obvious that the person is dead. Not only is the coffin readily apparent (the photos usually aren’t close-ups-- it seems that including the coffin must have been intentional in these cases) but the subject’s arms are crossed on their chest, and they sometimes have flowers draped around their heads or on their bodies.
Well, here I am; late as usual. Well, not “late”… 
Anyway, I do this all the time. Whenever I see an old photo or film, I think “He’s dead, she’s dead. That cat walking under the lynched rustler is dead…”