March 01, 2006
That box of Old Photos
Have you ever browsed through the boxes of old anonymous photographs in an antique store or at a flea market? It always disturbs me when I see these forlorn cast-offs all jumbled together, being sold for .25, .50...a dollar. I can't help but think of the people pictured and who they might be.
The worst part, however, is when I realize that someone at one time treasured those yellowed wedding photos, or cherished the picture of that old soldier. Anonymous as they've become, you'd think we could do more to commemorate these memories than to toss them into an old box at a rummage sale.
Fortunately, someone else out there thinks about this, too, and has made an effort to acknowledge these otherwise forgotten lives. Timetales.com, a project by photographer Astrid Van Loo and website designer Dick Dijkman, is a collection of these photographs.
You stand at a flea market holding an old photo album. One of the photos shows a newly married couple dressed in Sunday best; a few pages further, a frayed snapshot of a swimsuit-clad little girl, posing against a wall. The photos seem to have been taken somewhere around the 1930s. Who are these people? Are they still alive? How did this album end up at a flea market? Is there no next of kin? Maybe the family just didn’t care all that much about some great-uncle or other living in Finland. The photos are deemed worthless, and discarded.
Not all photos in time tales faced their waterloo this way. Some are scooped up from streets and alleyways, fallen from an overstuffed bag or torn pocket. Others turn up in a cabinet’s hidden compartment, found while wandering the rooms of an abandoned house. Now the photos exist by themselves, lost in time. Time Tales does not want to reveal their mysteries, nor can we. Time Tales asks to be the new home for lost photos, a resting place, for the nameless and the lost.
"It started out as a part of astrid van loo's website, which we began building back in 2000,” says webdesigner dick dijkman, who along with Van Loo organized and maintains the ever-growing project. “Astrid had been collecting found photographs for a few years. We noticed many people seem charmed by photos such as these. So, what started as a webpage of beautiful, touching images became a small museum of sorts; lost lives captured on film from all over the world."
Time Tale's online collection of photographs is divided into 5 periods: pre-1930; 1930-1950; 1950-1970; 1970-1990; and 1990-present. The images are shown as they were found, with no stories or suggestions as to their history - just the finder, place and year. Anything written on the back of the photo is noted as well.
Check it out at: http://www.timetales.com/index.htm.
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