The History Of Us
History. It tells us a lot about where we’ve been, and sometimes where we might be going in the future. Many of us tend to ignore it, or tried to just squeak by in school, and then never really giving it too much thought after that.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35th President of the United States and the youngest President ever elected. There have been a lot of theories about who assassinated him that day in Dallas, TX but there has never been an absolute answer. We may never know.
I was at the grocery store yesterday and I picked up a copy of Time’s 100 Photographs The Most Influential Images of All Time. I love books and magazines like this and I have collected quite a few over the years. [A dear friend started me down this path of “photo books”.]
A lot can be told about our lives through photographs, especially the last 150 years. Imagine photos taken that long ago where there were wide open empty spaces; no houses, no lights, no cars, very few people! Photographs exist of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. That can be mind boggling when you think of it. 1863! That’s 160 years ago. Want to be even more blown away? How about the earliest known photograph to exist? 1826! I feel sorry for the guy that had to sit there for 8 hours without moving!
Photographs have also documented our wars, from the War Between the States, to both World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and continuing up to today. They show the tragedy, heartache, death that war brings mostly to innocent people. It shows our history. History from all over the world. And shows how vulnerable we all are, and that we are all humans.
Photography doesn’t just chronicle us; it chronicles our lives and struggles, poverty and affluence, births and deaths, good times and bad. Photography takes us to the stars and to the underwater depths. It shows us the amazing and the shocking. It makes us laugh and cry. And what is so fantastic about photography today is that it now can be shared with the world via the internet.
So, you see, photography IS history, whether the images are produced by the most expensive cameras that exist or by that little communication device we know as our cell phone. A piece of us, and our lives, and all that gather around us, from peace to wartime, our pets, animals in the wild and in our backyard, the stars above and the ocean depths – it all becomes the History of Us.
Posted in Photography, Reflections and tagged history, jfk, photographic history by Jason with no comments yet.