Portraits stare clear eyed
full-lipped youths
accuse
somewhere between truculent and heroic
groups of wistful women
remind the jaded
post -modern eye
of a time when parlour curtains
stayed closed
shaded the pictures
from stray rays of sunshine
kept the pasteboard faces
posing on the piano
dark and sharp
as the coal black walls
of chapel and mill
ranks of grimy back-to backs
(chimney pots belching miasmal smog
like foul breath through broken teeth)
and the proud clock tower
of the subscribed Town Hall
situated on the crown
of Town Street Hill.
Littered less formally
fallen or ripped from albums
creased,, embarrassed slightly
by Agfa gloss
monochrome finish
sunshine snapshots
from a later, half forgotten age
sometime in the middle of a century
only just passed
beach and garden children
with Triang trikes and scruffy dogs
cricket bats and motorbikes
squint into the sun
faded to greyscale white
as if worn out
from too much gazing
by old eyes now weak
and vacant.
What did you think
Comments
1 - 12 of 12
-
old photography meant portrait
art accessible to masses
a sort of european ukiyo-e
everybody get your stamp
come have your bi-dimensional immortality
for a price and a frame of your choice
you can even go sepia if you like
the vignette is free...
you see it all starts
with someone trying to capture a moment
a move, a slice of life
and make it still
-
Old photos can cause great delay in cleaning up and out closets. One gets sucked into them -- and the stories they whisper even the "almost memories" of what so and so told you about this particular relative even though you never met them --- they fill ones head with whispers don't they?
I particularly like the foul breath through broken teeth image -- very good. And the last few lines -- like the way you've given action to both those in the photograph and the viewer... nearly spooky but mostly very evocative and atmospheric.
People are buying old photos by the bunches at the antique shop -- I happen to be partial to children with dogs -- swimming photos and umbrellas and bicycles -- okay i like anything that tells me a story. But it is a bit odd isn't it? All these discarded photos now for sale -- a family's history on the market. As if no one cares about them ---- except for profit.
I like this poem Stef.
-
-
Yes , people buy them here too- the old studio portraits, but increasingly family albums up to the 1960s. They come in here woith them, and I take them to save them from the pulping skips. I suppose there are people like me who study social history and suchlike from photos, but it is odd- with the ones that are related, why s it easier to be more interested in the stories of dead people than the living? It is for me. I could have asked all sorts of question why people were still alive, but didn't. I suppose I thought it was rude. Along with the family photos, books on local history- things about the family people in the pile of photos. They are to do with me , but not of me, if you see my meaning, and as such I feel involved , emotional, yet detached. It is strange but compelling. You are right, a head filled with whispers that thinks perhaps need a series of poems to organise them.
Thanks Lisa
-
-
Yes yes -- a series of talking photographs. or something such as that -- i may have asked you this but have you read Spoon River Anthology?
-
-
-
i still love looking at proper photographs... there is something quite exciting about opening the packet in the chemist or nowadays, max spielman's or similar....
but yes... life is forgotten all but the gazing into older eyes and wondering where the lions are... yes
vacant, you?? never....... lololol
lovely words, lovely lovely
-
-
Yes, the digital ones - I worry about whether the omages will still be around for socal historians and family in a hundred years. You can't beat the anticipation of waiting for the prints, to find a thumb or something on each one. Lovely human things.
I am very vacant these days, I'm afraid Gills.
Thanks, Luv
-
-
i am a great believer in all that is human things...
and human kindness too
be brave and enter into the vacant spaces and breathe..... i holler alot lololololol
-
-
-
The thing about pictures is they render the moment still and lifeless, when we look back on them and the memories, it usually is from a perspective of longing and wondering about why those days had to leave us, why we have to age and why sadness seems so imminent now when back then it was a distant thought. I guess we see the humaness of it all and regret it ends somewhere. the harder part is taking it all and remeasuring it to mean something to another generation who make life seem new again
C
-
chilling - you make the landscape a predator, and the photos become like trophies of a hunt. the awful emptiness of the eyes of the dead in the black and white pics is not as bad as the contrast of youth with age in the colour pics of later times, though.
'somewhere between truculent and heroic' - how diffident they seem, how caught between.
'weak
and vacant'
I can hear the Town Hall clock strike its burden in the hearts of the workers still.
-
i really liked how in the first stanza i rolled from one line to the next... forced but not forced... like i was the one pressed between glass and cardboard
-
weak and vacant
three words that define this whole thing for me...
old photos tend to confuse me
identical to my daughter
they hurt deep down
in a place i won't share with most
not black and white
but sepia with age
and yet
the inevitable mistakes
the pain
still shines through
thanks, you
for always seeing what most don't. -
-
And you always see with a unique eye Suzi
-
Adding your comment:
1 - 12 of 12
