A recent involvement in archiving the cache of photographs that my brothers and I discovered in the basement of our late father has had several unanticipated consequences.
A preoccupation with the past and, in particular, one's family ancestry seems to be in the zeitgeist at the moment. Given the many unpleasant realities that the post-twentieth century world has given us, this is probably to be expected. Then, too, the baby boomer generation, now well into its dotage, and having the leisure and affluence to indulge its whims, has reached a stage where reflection upon its past translates into such phenomena as the success of on-line web sites for exploring one's ancestry or the popularity of "Skip" Gates' PBS specials exploring the DNA trail of various celebrities. There are no doubt countless other explanations for what is going on--more of us are college educated, we are often the children and the grandchildren of immigrants with a sense of having "arrived" or just old-fashioned nostalgia.
In the process of poring over hundreds of old photos, however, I gradually became aware that my reaction to the images they contained had a certain leitmotif. I began to sense a certain calm that the images projected. Partly, this may have been due to the fact that one organizing principle that I employed when assembling the photos into small journals or scrap books was to restrict my selection to only black and white or, if they were even older, sepia samples. Now, without a long digression on the subject of the power black and white photography (including film) has as we are now well into a technicolor world, I began to realize just how important my editorial decision was. Included in the family collection, there were obviously many color pictures taken since color photography had begun to replace black and white photography as the preferred modality for family snapshots, a quantum leap that had begun in the late 1950s. Many, if not most, of the color photos seemed to have faded and lost their resolution with the passing years. They often had an orange cast that I some time ago came to associate with prints of feature films made in the 1960s, a decade in which orange seemed to dominate the palette. Surprisingly, the old black and white photos have often held up a lot better than the color photos that came to replace them in most family albums. Perhaps the difference can best be summed up by asking the reader to mentally compare the impact made by a Cartier-Bresson or Capra print to that made by a video tape of a B movie photographed in color during the 1960s. In any case, I stayed in my black and white realm, postponing the time when perhaps some over-arching insight would allow me to treat all those color images.
As I was looking at one cousin's photo, I became aware of the specific impact that the backgrounds in many of the older photographs was having upon me. Completely absent from the older photos was a common element in photos of more recent vintage--plastic. Instead, it was a world in which wood and brick, glass, stone and iron dominated. Even the clothing worn continues to project the aura of natural substances--of cotton and wool rather than of the still emerging technical marvels of nylon and polyester. 
Of course, there are still residential areas in which natural materials are almost exclusively utilized, but these tend to be in the more affluent districts, segregated from commercial zones. For most of us, plastic awnings, signage and building materials are all around us. We are literally drowning in plastic. This is not just an aesthetic concern. The recently broadcast PBS documentary, Bag It!, frighteningly illustrates the extent to which just one plastic item, the common grocery store bag, used by the billions, has come to represent a clear and present danger to our environment, particularly in our oceans. That danger, it appears, only worsens as plastic breaks down. Plastic is biodegradable. Though slow to break down, once it does, the small globules of the substance come to resemble plankton and other sea life whereupon, to their peril, it is ingested by larger animals.
, There are some who might accuse me of being a victim of nostalgia, of being psychologically predisposed to a past world that, photographed in black and white, was never really as uncluttered and "pure" as the impression those pictures create. While there may be an element of that at work, nevertheless, when I look back at images from the pre-plastic world we once had, I cannot shake the conviction that steps must be taken to restore our quality of life and to protect the environment. (I have already taken to bringing my own net bag to the supermarket and turning down their plastic bags, for one.) Certainly, greater regulation of disposable plastic must be instituted. And plastic should be used a lot less to begin with. My own niche cause, however, is to find some remedy for the use of plastic in signage and building exteriors. Do a mental exercise in your own community. Study the landscape and then try to imagine how the place would look if all of that plastic were removed. Except for a handful of individuals who find in scenes such as the one below a perverse satisfaction in that what is at work is unfettered freedom of expression, a kind of avant-garde, felicitous alternative to order and proportion, most of us I am convinced would breathe a welcome sign of relief were all the plastic and the neon that often accompanies it to disappear.
One solution would be to prohibit the use of plastic or at least to oblige builders and architects to submit to some benevolent local branch of government an application for its appopriate use. An alternative might be to declare an amnesty, something akin to the measures taken to get individuals to turn in illegally owned guns; in other words, pay people to take down the plastic and return to the days of wood and paint and glass.
While, unfortunately, unlike Miniver Cheevy, I appear not to be growing lean, I obviously join him in having many reasons for assailing the seasons. I have in these posts written of my disdain for, among other things, the automobile, skyscrapers and the saturation of the earth in ammonium nitrate in the name of encouraging its further overcrowding.
In the end, I maintain faith in the notion that one day mankind will come to its senses and abandon its gravely flawed technological sorcery for a regimen that truly nourishes body and soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment