Sometimes the best parts of old photos are the stories they hide in the details. The stories that only the photographer and the photographed might remember.
Take, for instance, this photo of me at our kitchen table, circa 1985 or 1986.
I can still feel the padded vinyl of that checkered tablecloth. The doll? Her name was Polly and she was my absolute favorite. I lost her once in a grocery store and was rather inconsolable, until some nice lady found her and turned her into the manager.
That cat ledge! What a thing that I took for granted as a kid (doesn’t everyone have a carpeted windowsill balance beam for their cat to gaze out the window?).
The grout on that rather ugly kitchen tile. It was brown and grainy and frequently chipped off. One day, while I was “helping” my mom to make chocolate chip cookies, I found a stray chocolate chip that I quickly popped into my mouth… only to discover it was a chunk of tasteless, gritty tile grout.
I’m pretty sure I cried and my mother gave me an actual chocolate chip as a consolation prize.
It’s memories like this that are the reason I like to capture background in the photos that I take today. Photos of things that seem ordinary and inconsequential in the moment. The background scenes that we take for granted in our every day life.
But those same scenes, one day, we’ll want to return to, to revisit all the memories they hold.
