Twice as mad...

The MADams Family..., originally uploaded by anyjazz65. These lovely old photographs are for the most part, rejects. At first they seemed only as victims of thoughtless relatives who pitched them out with no thought to the future generations of the family who would wonder. (An act that can be personally verified…) And truthfully, it is probably all too often just that. But there have been several other scenarios offered. As ARTNAHPRO suggested, sometimes when an elderly relative dies, it is just a matter of necessity to dispose of much of those personal belongings. There is often simply no place to put them or no way to transport them. Hard choices. So an ancient picture winds up in a swap shop. Occasionally there are deaths and no known living relatives. It can happen. The treasured belongings become just so much trash or is sold for taxes or is donated to a charity sale. Twice as mad..., originally uploaded by anyjazz65. Another possibility is that these old relics fell accidentally into obscurity by being tucked into the pages of books and magazines that were given away. Or possibly they were stuck in the backs of drawers and cabinets of furniture that went to the junk shops. One event that has proven true several times recently is that they were rejects from a photo studio. Sometimes multiple copies of the same photo have been found together. Each one altered slightly, corrected, cropped or exposed differently. These are the photographs that the photographer either rejected or could not sell to the customer. When a studio goes out of business or the photographer dies, what happens to all of these old photographs? If there is no photographer inheriting the business, they go to an estate auction or the trash. Recently this exact situation was explained by an antique shop owner who mentioned accumulating “hundreds” of portraits when a local photo studio when out of business. And some, snapshots especially, simply get lost or discarded. The boyfriend falls into obscurity, the clothes in the shot are outdated, someone blinked, there was a better shot or perhaps the subject was just unknown. But whatever the circumstance that brought these little squares of paper and cardboard to collector attention, they are fair game for imagination. What life is given them through observation and association is the only life they have. That is to say, their ONLY life unless some happy day, someone recognizes an ancestor or themselves in an old photograph. Then they can compare the real story to what has been imagined for them. Head Shots, originally uploaded by anyjazz65.