my grandmother's hats :: part one

in 2008, when my grandmother passed away, the house was left pretty much the same to the benefit of my grandfather. a few things were dispersed or donated but by and large everything stayed put. in 2014, when my grandfather passed away, my aunt moira, my dad, my uncle john, and my uncle brendan had the task of cleaning out and preparing the home for sale. my grandparents moved into the house sometime in the mid 1960s, i think. i need to find that out. to put it mildly, there was a lot of stuff to sift through. in that process, i came into the possession of, among other things, my grandmother’s hats that were in the front coat closet. i have no recollection of her wearing any of these hats. i feel like there is a photo of her wearing one of them at a wedding, but i am having a hard time locating that at the moment. inside one of the hat boxes, was a receipt for joels on main st.

i was recently up in the falls and decided to go to 1810 main street to see what it looked like today.

here is a look at what that block looked like in 1964. click here to see more images of main street from that time frame.

west side of main street at division looking north.

old film::roll #7

i'm thinking that this roll is from fall of 98 or winter of 98/99 (based on the poster in the bathroom). maybe i was home for thanksgiving? i dont think it could really be winter as there are no coats being worn. thanksgiving in chapel hill was often warm. i also don't know why else i would be home at this time if it weren't thanksgiving.

there are 3 distinct sets of images on this roll.

set 1) my guess is jordan lake. it's definitely not university lake. i can't think of any other bodies of water in that area that look like that. but! i also can't figure out  or remember why i would go to jordan lake.

set 2) this is the house that i will forever think of as "the house i grew up in".  i loved that house. not sure why all of the images are of the doors or door knobs. wish i could tell you. but there were a lot of doors in that house. the image above is looking into my parent's bedroom.

set 3) images of my immediate family. all 5 of us. which is pretty rare for this time period. i think we are all waiting for a table outside of 15-501  diner.  we all look a lot younger in these images but my mom hasn't aged a bit.

the processing and scan on this roll is less than great.. you can see chemical spots. hair and dust. not sure how i feel about that.

you can see the whole roll here.

old film::roll #6

these are from visiting amy in college. she lived on the beach which was quite different from my college apartment in chicago. warm, spacious, the ocean out the front door. i think she lived with two or three other women and then 3 or 4 of their guy friends lived next door. those guys also happened to be on the baseball team. 

i can't remember whose skateboard it was that we were all playing around with, though i am pretty sure it was amy's. i also can't remember what time of year this was. the birthday cake images are throwing me off.

these were taken (i think) with a lomo camera. the one that takes an image a split second apart then forming the grid. you can see it in the arms of the guy on the porch.  i wonder if i still have this camera.

dan and i were recently in wilmington and i asked him to drive by this house. it looks exactly the same but it's in different location than what i remembered. oh well, i guess that's what 17-18 years does to the brain.

you can see the whole roll here.

old film::roll #5

there are 7 years between my youngest brother, rob, and me. he was in early middle school at this time, i think.

he was sitting on the hood of a car in our driveway and i asked him if i could take some pictures of him. he obliged. i had regularly taken pictures of our brother, nolan, but not too many of him and i wanted to remedy that.  he can do these odd "tricks" with his eye lids, so i asked him to do them. it's really bizarre looking. rob and my dad are the only people i know that can do this. are there any more of you out there?

there was one time, we were in church, he flipped his eyelids and turned around. the person behind us audibly gasped and we all laughed. my mom was pretty upset but was also trying to not laugh at the same time.

the framing on some of these images confounds me. what was i going for??

you can see the whole roll here.

old film::roll #4

junior or senior year of college.. so 01/02 ish. on a cruise with my friends from high school,  amy and katie.

these all seem to be from the beginning of the cruise. take off through the first stop, key west.

isn't it always strange how water never photographs the way you want it to? the light, the shape, the dynamics of.. the two dimensional hardly ever does it justice.

you can see the whole roll here.

old film::roll #3

seaside park/heights, nj 2008/thanksgiving time

we went on a walk to get out of the house. the boardwalk is very different in the winter. desolate and still. no rides whirling or faux calliopes clashing.

dan grew up going to this boardwalk as he lived about 10 minutes away. he had his first job at midway steak house and then later worked  at the water park down the street.

a lot of what is in these images is no longer there. hurricane sandy wiped a good bit out in 2012. then a fire wiped out other parts of it in 2013. i'm incredibly grateful to have these images. 

additionally, i really loved those blue corduroys that dan is wearing in the last image. loved them.

you can see the rest of the roll here.

old film::roll #2

oh boy. this is a weird mix of people and places. must have been a winter break as some of the images are in chapel hill (carrboro) and some are in chicago. 

i am not entirely sure who one of the images is of or where it was taken. it feels and looks so familiar but can't for the life of me place it.  not being able to access this information in my brain is incredibly frustrating for me.

i am still very fond of this stretch of homes in carrboro- have always loved the porches. they don't look much different now. possibly a tad tidier.

ah..pearly sweets and the platonics. but only part of the band-karl, boz, pearly sweets; where is h carl?

you can see the whole roll here.

old film::roll #1

bored. taking pictures of myself because i didn't know what else i wanted to take pictures of. i was there. the camera was there. this may have been in my "shop girl" phase- you know the book by steve martin. there was a line in there that struck a cord with me that i tried to translate into photographs. something about seeing small patches of another's skin and being seduced by it. it being more alluring than that same person baring all. i remember photographing a few others around this time and it never quite matched the vision i had in my head of what that was.

crazy hair and no body in the bathroom on mozart.

in some of the other images, you can see the degradation of the film and the shadows of the sprockets. you can see the whole roll here.

old film

i have had a bag of exposed but undeveloped film for years. who knows how far back they go. they've been moved several times and kept in various temperatures.  i am sure some of it has been exposed to unwanted light and all sorts of other things that could prohibit any images from appearing.

i will be getting the film processed and posting the resulting images. i am incredibly curious to see what i saw or tried to capture then. little time capsules, waiting to breathe a bit. it's my guess that most of the images will be personal subject matter, rather than projects for school, but we will see.

i am excited. stay tuned.

bates

puppies