Not long ago I received an e-mail from a historian in Ukraine asking for a photograph of my grandfather. The scholar was writing a history of the town of Dobromyl. A few days later he asked for a photo of my grandfather’s elder brother. These requests compelled me to go through some old photos and digital copies.
I had neglected what I’d call the first rule of preservation: label each picture with the names of the persons depicted. It’s not enough, by the way, to write something like “my grandfather” or “Aunt Marta” on the back of the photograph; future perusers may not know whose grandfather or whose aunt Marta it was. Nor is it enough, obviously, to provide first names. If your family used patronymics, include those too, as they help to identify siblings as well as fathers. You can even add dates of birth and death and, if known, the date and place of the photograph. Fortunately, our family genealogist had identified most of the persons in these photos. I labelled them and, as security, attached duplicate labels to the backs of the frames.
This exercise revealed some unnoticed connections.
The young man photographed with a younger brother and their mother in Peremyshl around 1900, in bow tie and stand-up collar, and sporting a handlebar mustache, appears in an apparently later shot at the same photographer’s studio, now in Austrian military uniform, complete with a saber and the plumed shako of an artilleryman. His wife sits in the accompanying picture in a full-length high-collared dress and an enormous white hat, holding a parasol across her lap.
Some 35 or 40 years later, still in Peremyshl but now in the Polish People’s Republic, the same man sits surrounded by family. He is bald, with the discerning eyes of the retired judge and the sunken face of a man who has endured two world wars and one of whose sons – as I gather from relatives – had “fought with the Germans” and emigrated, possibly with the survivors of the Halychyna Division, to England. One can only imagine what it must have been like, given that family incident, to live in Stalinist Poland. His wife is absent, but his daughter is an almost perfect copy of her mother.
The younger brother in the first photograph is evidently in his teens; he wears a school uniform. We next see him around 1914, now in Austrian pike grey field jacket and cap, raising a glass mug of dark beer with four comrades in arms. Later that year he was deployed to the Serbian front. He perished, it is said, in Albania.
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability,” writes Susan Sontag. “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” (Susan Sontag, “On Photography,” 1977). We look into the eyes of a great-uncle whom we have never met, and who could not guess, at that moment, what we know: the place and time of his death, only months away and nearly four decades before our birth.
Photographs also show the change of generations. In the image from around 1900 the two brothers stand on either side of their mother, one with his hand on her shoulder, the other supporting her back. She is seated in a long dark dress, wearing a scarf, beneath which one can glimpse her straight dark hair, parted in the middle, peasant style. She is of another time, indeed, of a different world, from her two sons, the elder of whom is decked out in the suit and vest of the young 20th century professional.
As one can tell from the border, this and the two slightly later photographs were taken in the studio of B. Apfel on Third of May Street in the Zasanie district of Peremyshl. The subjects are photographed against a painted backdrop, possibly depicting a landscape, as was customary at the time. Beneath them luxuriates an oriental rug. In another family photo, shot by B. Henner of Jaroslaw (now Poland), the father, left hand inside his coat like Napoleon, sits next to his eldest son. Two younger sons stand behind them, all before a backdrop painted with palms, a curtain, a balustrade, tall Corinthian columns and an ornate stairway. Why photographers and their customers preferred certain poses and backgrounds is an intriguing question for cultural historians. The name and place of the studio, often appearing on the front or back of a photo, can also provide interesting hints: was this the nearest photographer, or was the family there for other reasons?
During World War I, Austrian soldiers could send home postcards with their own images from the front. In August 1918 a great-uncle, a first lieutenant stationed in Serbia, posed next to a four-meter cornstalk and mailed the image to relatives back in Stryi. (He died a couple of years later, during the Polish-Ukrainian war.) Snapshots from the 1930s and 1940s, neatly assembled in leather-bound albums, were different: now the modern autonomous individual could take his or her own pictures with a hand-held camera, indoors or outdoors. The poses are natural, even “candid.” But there is still style and grace. For some reason, the photos from my own lifetime generally lack this aesthetic. We appear awkward, out of place. Is the problem with us, or with the aimless, formless culture in which we live?
If you have family photographs spanning several generations, you may find it interesting to trace the periodic appearance of genetic traits. Those blessed with large families may find those same traits popping up in their relatives and descendants – though to discover your ancestors’ distinguished features on the blank visage of your weed-addled Millennial nephew, an i-Pod dangling from his ears, must be disconcerting.
And so, a chance request can prompt us to reconstruct a bit of the past. Collect those pictures, label and organize them. You will be contributing to history.