With Smudge In Yard

This family photo comes from my dear friend Susie who, appropriately enough, was my photography professor in college and tried her best (though she ultimately failed) to make me understand what an aperture does. This thing is awesome for several reasons:

1. The gun. What?

2. The flag. There’s a whole group of collectors of photos with American flags in them. They’re rare. The flags, not the people. Well, probably the people too.

3. The placement of that vase makes it look like the guy in the chair is wearing a crazy hat.

4. Love the piano. I collect old photos with musical instruments in them for my brother. If you do not have a hobby, one will be assigned to you. (I also collect dead-people photos for him. I know, weird. He loves them.)

5. Oh yeah, and the dog! He looks like a rug!

That was my initial response — that and shameless hinting that she should give me the photo so I don’t have to steal it from her house next time I visit. Then, as she often did in class, Susie gently pointed out that I was missing something major, and actually the man in the chair was too — his arm.

Just wow.

The man hovers, he thinks, just of frame, the hand on knee ready to grab and stay. But the dog has spotted something offstage and if he’s still it’s just for that muscle-tightening split-second before the leap. I love how this tattered cardboard frame barely contains the action of this little scene, a not-quite-perfectly-captured moment.

I imagine a mom taking this photo — an exasperated mom who goes to all the trouble of dressing her boy in a cleaned and ironed white sailor suit (immediately wrinkled again) and pulls a wet comb through his hair (the marks are still visible in his bowl cut) and then despairs when neither boy nor dog will hold still in the hot sun and ALL SHE WANTS IS JUST ONE GOOD PHOTO. The boy’s expression, his stranglehold on his new puppy say it all. Sitting for mom photographs is an exquisite kind of kid torture, and that sailor suit is being ripped off and thrown under the bed the minute the camera clicks.

“Sunday Morning” featured a piece about “Our Town” last week. It’s reportedly the most produced play in America, maybe because it calls for so little scenery, but more likely because it touches on that sinking feeling we all get sometimes that we are failing to “realize life while (we) live it,” that we aren’t appreciating who and what we have while we have them. Then the phone rings, the incoming email dings, and we forget again.

This positive image from a rare glass negative came from a friend’s family collection. It traveled over time to her without a chip, but also without a name or date or anything about the forgotten relatives who owned it. Studying the carving on the rocker, the little mat underneath, the dog’s round metal tag, the name plates by the screen door, the rooms of hidden objects behind, I think these were somebody’s “clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths …” These were somebody’s ordinary and everyday, and maybe they appreciated them, and maybe they didn’t, and now they’re all gone, all save this photo.

Mistakes — mistakes are my favorite. Fingers in the frame, the photographer’s shadow blotting out the subject, the subject’s head cut off … This one gallops right past incompetent and back around toward sort of weirdly artistic, or at least intentional. Funny, even sweet, because someone kept it anyway.

I joke about having antiques-store ESP. There’s no possible way to look at every single thing without going into a blood-sugar episode or getting a migraine, so I’ll say, “I’m going to find a birthday gift for Robin.” And then I will. A few weeks ago, I was eating supper in my kitchen, and I said, “I wish I had a yellow metal rolling cart like Grandma Hayes used to have.” I promptly forgot about it, then walked right up to one the next day. Christmas shopping with my friend Shannon recently at a great old warehouse of a place in Edinburgh (Indiana, of course), I said, “This is where I found my orange Carnival juice glasses a few years ago. I could use some more of those.” And there they were, one aisle over. Shannon marveled.

It’s a random talent, only marginally useful, but I’ll take what I can get. Dog photos, like books fallen open in the middle, give me the same weird feeling a lot of times, a vague intuition. This one in particular gives off a feeling of unease, with its weird pitching angle, its dog cowering on a strange perch, its dark slash of a man silhouetted at right. What is he doing there, that forbidding shadow blotting out the lines of the house?

How do you make a charming photo of a sweet little boy and his dog creepy and unnerving? Insert a random image of a stern old man in black. Insert it upside-down. 

Was this meant to be cut apart? To be mailed as-is to some unsuspecting relative? (It is printed on the front of a postcard …) Or was it, like the photos taken with toy Holga cameras, some kind of artistic accident? At least it was a happy accident, to my eyes — but then I frequently like things for the wrong reasons, as this blog is no doubt ample evidence.

I love the photos that should have been thrown away. We don’t really have those anymore, not with a little viewing window and delete button on every camera. And yet see how much more personal they can seem? This old find bears the hand of the maker quite literally — in the shadow of a finger that drifted into the frame. And the tilting horizon line, the pen that ran out and had to be gone over in a different color, the corner that was bent and then smoothed — they’re as interesting to me as the hardscrabble landscape and the old truck in the background and Ray, who loved his dogs. Because someone obviously loved Ray.

Love hurts, the old song goes — the ego mostly. Dogs have always known this. For mysterious reasons their owners persist in signifying their devotion by forcing them into stupid hats, wrestling them into Halloween costumes or baby carriages, making them sit still for photos. They pretend they’re people, which dogs find humiliating. But being dogs, they also love love, and so they acquiesce, just for a moment.

My dog wore this exact expression last week, waiting with pained resignation in a chicken outfit in the front yard for my camera shutter to click. My toddler Tommy, in her trick-or-treat duck costume, had this same haircut, the same bangs, a little crooked. The same look of delight.

So you start out looking for old dog photos. There’s usually at least one in those big cardboard flea-market boxes full of postcards and yellowed maps and pictures of somebody’s forgotten relatives. You always take the 10 or 20 minutes to look and there it is.

The problem is, there are these other pictures waiting there too, oddities you feel fairly certain no one else will appreciate, and because they only cost 50 cents or maybe the dealer throws them in for free, you take them like a person who goes to the pound for just one puppy and comes home with a litter, afraid of what will happen if you leave even one behind. This is how you end up owning photographs of carefully posed chickens, old ladies smoking pipes, families cheerfully picnicking in gothic cemeteries. And this. What the heck is this?

Let me start by saying I found this in my favorite booth in my favorite antiques store in Muncie. (I am very likely the youngest person by at least 20 years to have a favorite Muncie antiques booth.) I had flipped past it by a few photos before it registered as something more than a rather mundane portrait. Wait, was that a face over the girl’s shoulder on the left? I flipped back, I looked more closely. Holy crap, was that four faces?

Tricks of shadow, double exposure, some old-fashioned hoax — no doubt there is a reasonable explanation. But reasonable explanations aren’t that fun, and this photo, with its strangely bemused faces melting into the foliage, into each other, is fun in a very creepy, ghosty kind of way.

Happy Halloween, and thanks for reading With Smudge in Yard. Next time I’m back to dogs, I promise.