Sunday 25 March 2001

With the acquisition of the old photo album today: As I was looking at it, weighing the idea of spending ten dollars for it, I noticed that a large number of its pages were unused. The idea occurred to me, to fill this book with contemporary photographs, to have 1910 faded black and white at the beginning, and 2001 at the end. As well, the person selling the book had Carte de Visite for sale. I had browsed through them earlier, and had a strange feeling, of looking at 19th century faces, and of course, the image of William Gibson’s imagined art work, Read us the books and the Names of the Dead.

When I got this book home, I scanned in the images of the carte de visite I had bought, and glued them into the book. I had made a sign, which read, Prelude, the 19th Century, and then, those faces, those beards, how strange they were! It is a very different world we live in. As I placed those images on the glass of the scanner, especially the one that is dated and signed, 27th August 1866, I thought of the long journey they had made, and what a strange resting place that image had found on glass between plastic and electricity. The images appear on the screen, a technology unimagined when they represented the earliest days of reproduction.

Using my Palm, I was able to determine the dates of three photographs. The first two are in the album, and are obviously taken at around the same time, since they are meant to echo one another. A picture preceding these was of a grave stone, clearly marked with a date of death of 27 May 1910. The grave is fresh, and there are flowers placed around it. I thus knew that these images were around 1910. I also noticed that the last day was a Saturday the 30th. Using my Palm, I was able to determine that it was either April 1910, September 1911, or November 1912, since those are the only months containing 30 days upon which the 30th fell on a Saturday. Closer inspection of the calendar showed that the weekends were colored differently than the weekdays, and that the first Monday was coloured differently as well. Aha! Labour day! It is September 1911. Just to make sure, I checked on the net to see when Labour Day came about, and it was established in the 1880s, so I am thus reasonably sure that these two photographs were taken that September.

The other photo, once again, a family, posed in front of a calendar. This wasn’t clear, so I scanned it in, and zoomed it up to a legible size. Manipulating the brightness and the contrast, I was able to see a clear date emerge: 1920. And, once again using the Palm, I scanned through the months for the number combination as it existed in the image: that is primarily, a Monday the 2nd, a Sunday the 8th, Sunday the 15th and a Sunday the 22nd. The Sunday the 1st wasn’t visible, so I thought that it must have been washed out by the flash. I found that August 1920 fits that description, and thus I wrote that on the back of the photo. Now regarding that grave: I want to find this grave, I want to stand where they stood and take the same photograph, only in 21st Century terms: that is, a colour snapshot, 35mm. I want to paste this in the back of the book, at roughly the same place, to provide a symmetry, and to show what 90 years does to the trees and to graves. The grave is that of a Charles Hayne, who died on “27 May 1910, at the age of 55 years 7 months”. I tried to use the net to find some records of him – this of course yielded no results and frustrated me. I now want to go to the archives downtown, and look up his death record, to find where he is buried. I think the person who sold me the book said that it came from Bridgeport, which is down around Kitchener. If I can find this information, this summer, it would be a project to accomplish.