I have a place where there are two flat file cabinets, one with five and the other with four drawers, where I can rummage through for the next several hours, searching among salvaged photographs, negatives, transparency slides and even a drawer filled with an array of papers and a few random letters.
There I stood feeling as though time was running out and I had quickly piece back together the families that have been cast aside into all directions and retrieve as much as I could from being permanently lost.
My urgency has been accelerated since my post Generations Pass in Silence Before Me, as I see a major shift in what I find in these drawers now, but also because of a recent second trip to San Francisco, visiting the Pier 24 Gallery, who’s current exhibition features found and second-hand photographs.
Yet each visit to these two flat file cabinets does not necessarily produce a harvest as my last visit, in which I have found a complete photo album with only one missing image, or another set of a particular family from whom I already had some earlier photographs, only to discover a few more to deepen the mystery of who they were.
The images are carefully sorted, others are added to another box because they are to be scanned for a specific eBook/iBook project currently in the works. The letters that I found will have to wait, besides I need to go back and see if I missed any, for it appears there are numerous missing pages of correspondence between the mother and her son.
For now let me share with you what I managed to bring home, in the hope of telling their stories, real or imagined, in the years that are left to me.
In the back of this photograph was written the following:
March 6 − 1942
With Love
To Uncle & Auntie Perosimian
Sarah & Dollie
Sincerely Yours
Rosie Kachadurian
All photographs taken with an iPhone 4S by
©2014 Egmont van Dyck - All Rights Reserved
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