"Happy people in old photographs"

It is always unsettling to look at happy people in old photographs. Pictures of history are not the same- the faces of famous men, of battlefields, of poor children who glare out of their window in time. In these cases, the shades of black and white suggest only antiquity, a quaintness that people can smile at but not understand.

Instead, it is those who are smiling and young that we pity. We understand that the captured moment was soon over- that the young woman's hat could not remain aloft, but hit the pavement, its aster ribbon crinkled; that the veteran sailor's lips left his smiling bride's, and that the two returned home, where the woman looked out of the window over the sink and wondered about that tattered look in her husband's eyes.

We pity them because we understand what they did not: that they are silent, and shadowed, and gone. They look at us from the bottom of a well. It is unfair, that they do not know our faces, that we can gaze at them while they remain still and defenseless.

Many American Indians, when first exposed to a camera, would not allow their pictures to be taken. They felt that the capturing of their image would mean the capture of their souls. It is easy to believe them primitive, but maybe an echo of that fear is in all of us. When we lift a hand to shield our faces from a camera's lens, laughing and offering excuses, we are marveling at how easy it is for anyone to seize the sight of us. How simple it is to take us out of normal time, trapped forever in that lighted window of glazed paper. That, too, is the pity we feel- that we have saved these people when they wanted to be let go, granted that final relief of being forgotten.