We often use this time at the beginning of each year for reflection and prediction (or pontification). The punditocracy relishes packaging these into “top 10” lists. There seems to be one for almost everything, which leads me to think there might be some cognitive quirk in our human nature that urges us to categorize and order things, even though many question the utility of such an exercise.
I have spent the last several weeks organizing and scanning photographs in my grandparents’ and parents’ photo albums. This is a process that inflicts reflection as one is forced to look closely at each picture; not just skim through the pages. As I looked at each photograph I noticed the image quality, the event, the quirkiness, etc. I felt myself being drawn into an ordering and ranking process, yet I resisted the callings to create a multi-dimensional assessment scale. When I came across the photograph below, I knew that if I must submit and pick a top photograph, this one was it. There was no need for categorization to falsely justify a choice. It was all intuition.
I was reminded of Roland Barthes’ essay on “The Winter Garden Photograph” where he talks about a picture of his mother and her brother that, for him, captured a moment in time, a time “that has been”, its historical context and a personal element, which for Barthes was the story of his mother.
The picture above made me think of the historical events unfolding in 1935, juxtaposed against the fairy and elf outfits worn by my mother and her classmates. I wondered about the paths that each followed, the accomplishments made and as a result how much better things are today. A case in point, life expectancy in 1935 was about 61 years old; in 2020 it was about 821.
One might be tempted to say this picture is of a simpler time but maybe we just over complicate things today, including by categorizing and structuring things, and picking “top-10s”.
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