I love old photographs, especially family photographs. There is just something more innocent and comforting about peering into a world that is some how linked to your life now. I enjoy how this forces you to question about the content and the connection.
My mother's side of the family was vastly different from what I am. She grew up in, what I believe was, a two bedroom house with her parents, and two of her four siblings, without an indoor toilet until she was almost out of high school. They heated their house with a wood stove. My grandmother made mom's dresses for her out of empty flour sacks. They used to milk their own cows and sell the cream every week. They killed chickens, ate fresh eggs and had more of a connection to the land that I will probably ever know, and they did this all because they had to.
That sort of living, in all reality does not exist anymore in the same form in this country. I'd be lucky if the chicken who laid the "organic" eggs I ate yesterday have ever even seen more than artificial lighting, a wall and thousands of her counterparts. Only if I made the obvious effort to march myself down to the farmers market would I hope to see something even remotely close. I think I read that only 1 to 2% of our population are farmers... there are more people unemployed and in prison. I don't think I've ever wished so much that I could grasp onto this something, this unfamiliar life slipping away.
