Photos

Like many kids, I used to believe that the world before 1950 or so was a black and white world, as evidenced by the grayscale photographs I routinely saw from that time period. Things looked drab in this "Pleasantville" or "Giver" world without color, and in my little boy way, I rejoiced in the fact that people discovered color before my lifetime began. As I have grown older, I have of course shed my amusingly naive beliefs. Yet I am often surprised at how my interpretation of pre-color photograph life remains the same. While intellectually I understand that the world of that time mirrors the world of today in a multitude of ways, my view of life and culture is skewed by the colorlessness of the photographs through which I connect to that previous time period. Adding to my interpretation is the rigidity of many photographs from the early 20th century. People look serious, almost somber, even in family portraits and summer camp staff photos. I find it difficult to imagine that people sent pictures of their unsmiling families to each other as christmas cards. I still find it awkward to picture that time period in color, as I have attained my entire perspective from a colorless collage.
         While photography has been an essential piece of the media and of my exposure to the unknown, I find that it somewhat bounds my ability to imagine. I have seen photographs of awe inspiring mountain landscapes, and beautiful sunsets over snow speckled conifers in the upper reaches of Canada's Rocky Mountains. Amid all this access to nature, can anything remain untouched by the human eye? I sometimes wonder if it would be possible for me to travel to a place on earth that no person could just as easily travel to on google images. Of course, I appreciate the ability to so easily stand a few hundred yards from the summit of the Matterhorn without leaving the safety of my desk chair. However, this ease of access to such stunning photographs is a double edged sword, as experience in the flesh becomes a comparison to the impressiveness of the photographs I have witnessed. I hope that photographs do not have this same effect on all people, but I fear that they do.