Passage I

Picturing the Past

[1]

Before I left home to attend college, my grandmother gave me a bag filled with old photographic negatives. Having enrolled in a photography class for my first semester, I had offered to preserve some of our family's memories before the film deteriorated or got lost. My grandmother patted my hand and said, "Good luck, Angela."

[2]

[1] I soon came to love the silence of the photo darkroom, illuminated only by its dim, red safelight. [2] Something about that isolation, and darkness seemed mysterious. [3] I took a negative from the collection and enclosed it in the glass of the enlarger. [4] An enlarger is a magnifying device used in printing photographs. [5] I exposed the paper with a flash of light through the negative and then placed the paper in a developing solution.[6] Soon, the faces' of my mother's family began to appear on the paper. (6)

[3]

Early in the semester, I opened the bag of battered negatives and began to examine them. "I don't know," I told my grandmother doubtfully over the phone, "but I'll see what I can do." Some of the negatives were not much larger than postage stamps, while others were as large as greeting cards. Holding them up to the light, I could scarcely make out traces of faint figures. Many of the negatives were bent and faded, and some were speckled with age spots.

[4]

In one shot, my young grandparents toted crates filled with ripe fruit, and my mother sat on a branch, peering down at the camera. They floated before me, not like ancestral ghosts but physical and alive. Yet, all my mother's stories came to mind. I recalled her description of the long hard hours, spent working in the migrant camps and the peach and apricot fuzz that prickled it's skin. (12)

[5]

In the darkroom that first semester of college, far from home, I studied these scenes from the lives of my relatives. Whenever I felt discouraged, those photographs would reassure me. Though the distance in time and space between us was great, I knew that as long as I had those photographs, my family could never be far away.