Hello photography, my old friend. It’s been awhile.
Almost all (virtually would be a poor pun) talk about photography since my last column has involved “AI,” whatever that means. Plagiarism! End of the universe! Art first! and all the other typical execrations that accompany any new technology fill the social media feeds and the airwaves.
I am far from a technocrat. My friends would say I am extremely skeptical of technology. Yet I have zero interest in shouting down “AI” technology at this point. I’ve written about this before. The divergence of DALL-E for instance from the history of daguerreotype is instructive — the French government made sure that photography was in the public domain, where DALL-E et al are privately owned and monetized — but still not my concern as a writer. Some other time, perhaps.
I am still of the opinion that if people spent 1/10th as much time actually looking at photographs of any sort that they spend theorizing about “AI” we might evolve as a species something beyond having an opposable thumb.
Anyway, on to this picture upon which I stumbled recently.
The picture in my hand is a rectangle, about 2″ x 3″ — I don’t have a ruler handy so I’m measuring it with my pastry cutter. Likely this is a 2x blow-up of a standard 135 film frame. The ratio is correct, but it’s hard to measure 48mm by 72mm precisely with my primitive tool. The surface is glossy on the recto and plain old flat white paper on the verso, though over the years it’s gone somewhat yellow. The paper is light and fairly thin, with borders that are clean cut not deckled, and the lower right corner slightly bent, probably from handling. The print is clear overall, with a slight stain in upper right corner. Overall the photo has a slightly concave warp. Highly likely, I think, that it was not kept in a family album.
The verso has a batch number “B36,” with the B curiously upside down and backwards. The old “Velox” label is printed on it in two different places. The verso also has handwriting that reads “Drew, Kate & Kids,” written in ball-point pen ink.
Within the rectangle of the image itself, the composition is primarily triangular. The jungle gym forms the largest triangle, with two other interlocked triangles. One is formed by the top of the child’s head to the feet of each adult on either side of her; the other, from the top of the child’s head to the knees of the adult on the right of the frame to the knee of the boy at the left of the frame. The contrast of shapes stems from the circles at the base of each post of the jungle gym, the rings of the jungle gym itself, the heads of the children and adults, and the oddly intrusive balloon above the little boy’s head. The visible lines are primarily vertical: the jungle gym, the telephone poles, and the people’s bodies. The only oblique lines are in the background, which helps create a sense of depth behind the foreground.
The nominal subject matter (i.e., the jungle gym and people) is centered but the weight of the picture is slightly off center because of the hard crop at the edge of the frame on the right hand side. The top one-quarter of the frame is almost completely empty. The lower quarter of the frame contains a shadow of a figure in a hat at the extreme left of the frame, and not much else. The sky is blown out to pure white. There is barely any real black at all, so the fact that the highest point of contrast (the boy’s shorts against the woman’s dress) is hidden at almost dead center of the frame and is somewhat confusing. A better crop of the picture would be like so:
Given the rather casual composition, the awkward cropping, the soft focus, and the obvious “mistake” of leaving the photographer’s shadow in the frame, it is easy to conclude this is the handiwork of a fairly amateur photographer.
Dating the photograph is fairly easy too, at least within a narrow range. The Kodak single line Velox adorned their papers from the 1920s through the 1940s. The car in the background would be helpful if I were more of a car expert. But I don’t need it. I have a bigger clue: the ball-point pen. The writing on the verso is certainly in ballpoint pen. Biro did not patent his ball-point pen until 1938. The Birome was not distributed in the United States until 1945. The hairstyles of the adult women emphasize this, too. They are typical of the 1940s wartime, where hair is always pulled back and the whole face shown, because working women particularly on assembly lines were required to have their hair removed from danger. The round window design on the car indicates this time period too.
My interpretation is that this is a photograph of a very routine, pleasant, post-WWII outing by two families. The adult women in the picture look quite different from each other, though they are likely around the same age given the facial features. There is a third adult in the frame standing on the ground behind. I assume she is a woman (judging from the dress and stole that are visible) but her face cannot be seen through the other woman’s body so I can only guess at her relationship to the others. The smaller children rest on the jungle gym bars for a portrait between the two women, with the two somewhat taller girls at the very top of the gym. The boy in shorts is vastly outnumbered by the girls — four against one — so even though he is the height of the second girl at the top, there is no room for him to be there. The girls at top are the only ones not looking at the camera. Both of their gazes are off to the left of the frame and downward — which makes sense. It’s easy enough to sit on or lean against the crossbar at the top as they do, but sitting on it to face the wrong direction for a picture would require a high degree of skill. They seem delighted to have climbed that high but careful to stay there.
What strikes me about this picture as I sit here in 2024 is how natural and easy the picture seems. But I am from Gen X. If I were a Millenial or younger, I might be surprised or even shocked by this picture.
That jungle gym is all metal. Its poles are driven into asphalt and held by cement. It’s also around 7 ft tall, judging from the relative size of the standing woman. Yet all the children in the picture are higher off the ground than their heights, sitting on hard metal bars above solid concrete, and not one of them flinches. Aren’t they aware how dangerous it is? Someone might get hurt!
But of course they won’t.
Metal playground bars like these are a thing of the past. Three decades of frightened yuppies who, of course, themselves climbed on bars exactly like this have trod through the legal system and NGO influence to ensure a generation and a half have never had an unsupervised — or even supervised — playground experience like this. Consequently playgrounds themselves have become so boring that children won’t even bother. It’s all well-intentioned, as all roads to hell are. Kids need to be safe. The world is unsafe. So much more dangerous than when we were teens dropping acid and twirling on merry-go-rounds, blah blah blah.
But none of this is true. Violent crime is close to a 50 year low. Juvenile violence is at its lowest since 1980, and the crime rate measuring adult violence against juveniles has decreased every year since 1974. The world is just fine. And regarding the alleged safety of the sterilized plastic and rubber playgrounds, the data reveal this fact that will surprise absolutely no one from Gen X:
The frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either…. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
Because, as the phrase goes, accidents are accidental. If you could prepare for them they wouldn’t be accidents. The world is no more dangerous, and equipment is no more safe from reality than it was at any point in my life, yet people are more convinced by media reporting that imminent danger lurks in every see-saw, on every corner, in every playground, in every stranger.
When old people get nostalgic about how great things were x number of years ago, most of it is utter crap. Every decade sucks and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But every so often, when those old voices talk about how exciting it was and how nowadays kids can’t get away with _________ (fill in the blank: synonym for fun), there’s a dagger in the laughter. No sane human wants to go backwards. But no one should want to go into anesthetic soma coma, either. Lots of things sucked about 1946 — ask any Indian or Chinese or Vietnamese. But children still played outside, even in the rubble of destroyed buildings in England, because, you know, they’re kids and they should be outside discovering their world and no matter what you’ve been told, the world is out there and not on a computer screen filtered through Net Nanny. Children have to pick up the pieces we nitwits have left them. Trying to control how they view their world and how they respond to it by depriving them of lived experiences is the pinnacle of Boomer ego and Gen X foolishness.
