Using details for storytelling

March 26, 2009

Doorbell, California

One of the things that photography allows you to do is discover details from events and objects  that you stuck onto a negative or a harddrive somewhere and haven’t thought about for a while.   Once you open up the negative onto a print or pop your file into photoshop you have a second chance to see a scene for the first time.

The doorbell belongs, or rather belonged to my grandfather.  I took this picture shortly after his death last year as we were staying at his house for the funeral.   Before everything was put into boxes I went through the house and took pictures of details that I remembered.  Paintings. Lamps. Radios. The television.  I should have taken a shot of  the scotch bottles he always kept on top of the refrigerator.

After scanning this negative I got a closer look at the doorbell and noticed that there was a seal (you’ll have to click on the image to see it larger) which read in part, “live better electrically”.

I found this an especially apt sentiment for a chemical engineer who was born in 1915 and did see his profession change the world.  When he was 18 and on his second year at UCLA the Tennessee Valley Authority was formed to economically develop a (still) impoverished area of the country.

My grandfather did believe this was the best of all possible worlds and had a great deal of faith in people.   I’m not sure if he ever noticed the seal, who ever bothers to look at their own doorbell after all but I think he would have seen himself as part of that milieu which would have written things like that.

I come from a far more cynical time even as I  continue to see technology cause radical economic and cultural change.    Perhaps its my own jaded nature but I tend to see innovation driven largely by profit rather than any real desire to improve the world.  Its  difficult to assign any ethical motivation to a drug company that refuses to reduce the price of HIV medication for the third world until India threatens to reverse engineer their patented medications and release their own generic versions.

I was surprised that such a small and previously missed detail would have given me pause.  I’m planning on going through the rest of my negatives and pulling out further objects.   I don’t have any photos of my grandfather that I took myself.  All I can do is show you fragments and talk about them.  The fragments don’t speak for themselves but they speak to me and I hope I can tell you what they say to me.

Posted in Current Projects, Technique