Evocative and wonderful!
Here's a section out of a short novel called "Up in Smoke" written by a "friend". (Available on B&N and Amazon web bookstores. The writer told me he needs the money for a new camera.) He too was fascinated by the idea of what photgraphs really are and the place they occupy in our lives. BTW, the story is told by an intelligent but uneducated boy.
Quote--And in our house there wasn’t a drawer where you couldn’t find a couple of rolls of 35 millimeter negatives stuck away in a dusty corner someplace in one of those tin-plated cans that they used to sell to keep the light off of the film. On gray November days when it was cloudy or raining and the house was chilly and dark with only wood creaking somewhere, I used to dig through the drawers of the old Mission desk under the stairs to find the films and then zip a roll out on my thumb and hold it up to the lamp to study the shadowy images of Gen and Mary, two little girls standing on the running board of our old ‘32 Studebaker in their Easter dresses that my mother sewed, or us five brothers all lined up by age in front of the house, wearing shirts and ties and Sunday knickers and shined up shoes—or tiny, faraway sailboats on the Delaware, or even Richard himself, real close, staring into the camera in that startled wide-eyed way that made you know he took the picture himself, holding the camera out.
Those strips of negatives were like a separate little world with all the light things dark and all the dark things light that let you see into a time before you were born. And the people in them, your own family, not knowing then that you were coming to be with them, and then seeing the later ones with me in them after I did come. Looking at them would always give me a queer, lonesome feeling, and make me think about what a lucky chance it was that I got born at all, being the last of seven kids like I am, and that if it wasn’t for the thinnest little string of jism and a lot of luck, I might still be floating around out there in the universe someplace and never would of been born at all. Yet what was on those films was actually a real place and a real time - small, still moments sliced out of time and out of lives that used to be, captured forever and buried away in the back of a desk drawer."
Tom
Deecy//
http://tomdeecy.blogspot.com/ 
