A Thing of the Past

I am almost always fascinated by black and white. That is, still photos taken way back in 1800s which lack the actual color of the images. Colors that, had they been captured and preserved, could have satisfied our eyes as the times of yore linger in our thoughts. Sometimes I tend to think that maybe back then the world must be plainly sepia and then time after time the wind had cleared away the atmosphere and revealed the true colors of the earth.

In amazement, I always wonder how it was back then. The photos of the past are in itself hypnotic. They seem like a vaccum that warps and sucks an audience into a totally different threshold to the past and altogether disappearing from the present - an amazing feeling that we will forever be curious about and will remain mysterious to this generation. The question remains: how was it like living as our ancestors lived?

In the same manner, the curiosity remains: What stories were invisibly going on around the background of the photographs? I have seldom seen portraits of the 1800s wherein the subject radiated a smile before the shutter closed, most probably because it would exacerbate the already constrained stint of a tiresome 10 minutes of posing before a sliding wooden box camera and, especially, on tightly fitted dresses that forbid free movement. I began to think that the people back then were utterly serious and didn’t find it necessary to smile or laugh, which gives me the notion that through time our generation became more playful and carefree. Probably because we came to realize, after the 1^st & 2^nd world wars, that life is too short and it is such a waste to acquiescingly live in the confines of unreasonable laws and irrational beliefs at that time, and so we welcomed change. At least that's what I thought.

Take the Boynton Boys’ photograph for example and see what I meant by non-smiling portraits.

Or the Humphrey's…

Abigail Jane Humphrey, late 1800s

Or the Schwab Family portrait...

Workers of the 1800s 

And a group of boys…

 These children, by one look at the picture, would give you an idea that they are almost of the same juvenile age of between 10 and 12 years. These boys are coal miners of the late 1800s. Not even one wore a smile, obviously not happy with the labor of mining at an early age realizing that this looked far from playground (merely an opinion of mine).

 I am struck in awe by how imaginative a set can become before a photo shoot in the late 1800s. Take for instance this portrait of Irene Done.

But a deviation in the history of non-smiling human portraits came across my sight. It somehow made me proud and sort of unsurprised to have seen at least a smirk coming from our very own.

Jose Rizal, left most

It was concluded that in this picture Jose Rizal and Nelly Boustead (fourth from left, Rizal's girlfriend) stole a glance at each other, the meaning of which only the two of them knew, before the photo shoot. That explains the inspired look on his face through a reserved smile.

And the amazement continues...

The first picture ever taken, circa 1826, was by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.

 Said to be the earliest surviving photograph of a nature scene.

Another non-smiling portrait, of Robert Cornelius, as the first image of a human ever produced, circa 1839.

Robert Cornelius, 1839

I can't help but wonder, what did Robert Cornelius do a minute after this very photo was taken? Did he smile widely to express his excitement for the first human photograph produced in history that is his own? Then maybe he took more pictures until he was competely satisfied with his work. But that we will never know.

The same question goes for this portrait of...

...Josephine Bracken. Was she thinking about Jose Rizal, her husband, while her photo was being taken? Where was her next stop after this shoot?
The fondly imagination of a probable daily stint after a still photo amazes me over and over again.

Louis  Daguerre, the inventor of daguerreotype process of photography, took a picture in Paris on 1838. The image required an exposure time of 10 minutes, therefore people or carriages in motion would naturally vanish from the scene. Surprisingly, a man stayed still during the entire procedure and what appeared to be having his shoes shined.

That man who probably planned to start his day by getting his shoes shined never came to know of his appearance in this photo that marked the history of photography.

Through the years, our cameras dramatically turned handy from a sliding wooden box. Just imagine how Roger Fenton drag along with him his full set of photographic equipment, referred to as Roger Fenton's Photographic Van.

1855

These people inevitably lived only for a certain period of time and one day led to a death neither new nor ancient to you or me.

A cemetery in New England with graves dating back to the late 1700s.

Had images been more permanent as it had become in the 1800s, let's say during 100 B.C. and the time of Jesus Christ, what would have the behaviour been in the photos? How did they look exactly like? What untold stories would have been drawn from the photographs that will be another left for imagining?

Stories that were accounted for and prehistoric cave carvings or paintings remained as the only concrete evidence and basis of the images of the past before the camera age. Believe it or not, in sheer wonderment, I always fantasized of being able to live in the B.C. or A.D. era. A curiosity that will apparently remain a question in my head where answers will equally be left hypothetical.

Such is Life

Right now, I just feel like I want to strip myself off of all the inauthentic layers that have drowned me and kept my core in the dark, temporarily but seriously blinded me to sulkiness.

I share the same notion on getting older as Maria Ressa’s,“Too often, as we get older, we stop really looking, stop really listening, stop living in the moment.” She continues, “We get in the car. We drive to work. We barely look at the people we run into. We’re barely alive because we’re thinking of future tasks and future deadlines.” Here she was broaching apropos her blog - ‘Living in the Moment’.

I, by fortunate chance, grew up in a small city in a province, Naga city. Though considered as city, the fresh air we desire most on every nature escapade can be breathed there. It was once a simple, happy place where the hustle-bustles of a city life is but ironically strange. Though called a city, I was still labeled as probinsyana when I first set foot on Manila where the true level of a city life is defined. And now finally I am in Dubai, this is not just a total experience of busy streets and dizzying shoot ups of skyscrapers but a whole new world of strangers. The dramatic movement and brave attempts to fulfill the popular cosmopolitan dream were quite apparent and obvious.

I remember the conquests that I’ve been through to achieve this stage that even as a probinsyana kid I never thought I’d reach. Although dreaming never stopped and I believe that was the major push to its realization. Such is life, I thought, when we try harder to leave a place getting-too-familiar, as that would define our progress in life in a matter of change while casting-off over time. I did not just see the differences and sudden changes with my own eyes but, by way of necessary stubbornness, felt them brushing me off or spurn me to the ground. It came to my light that the world isn’t so kind after all and getting more unkind than ever.

The fight to tear through modernization went on. There was no giving up, not until I break the code to my success. As a Filipina, most of my actions in order to traverse on towards one goal were at times deemed kapit sa patalim. Such is life, I re-thought.

Then I became very busy. It was a given fact that every progress comes with great responsibility that would, phase by phase, eat off your time – your self-moments, that is. Then you’ll find out, out of the blue (like as if it was never there), that things are no longer the same. They are in fact disgustingly different that the yearning for being back to the probinsya, in order to recreate ‘different’ into ‘same’, becomes expensive when it once was free. This, I believe, is becoming more and more common to the populace consisting mostly of yuppies. The threat of psychological disturbance starts to breeze in.

Then we sulk, get depressed, angry and irritable. Blaming it all to the outside forces. We wish we never tried reaching this path, making this pact or taking responsibility. We go back in time and cast a longing lingering look behind wishing that we should never have left a halcyon place for a monstrous city. As they always say, regrets never come first.

We stopped living every moment as they become too familiar as routine. So sad.

At times the peeling off of unnecessary layers, trapping the fundamental nature of existence, is uncomfortable as we see the place where we started like as if it has become a strange place altogether.

Allow me to quote him too, TS Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I concede that at this point in time I got acquainted with anxiousness, and I am talking about a daily routine anxiety. 45 days before I reach 30 years of age I began to feel the need for retirement alongside nature with nothing else but food and clothes. Back to basics, that is. I would kill to breathe that air.

I am confident that soon enough, when the time is right, I’d find my way back to the place where I started and begin a life I never thought was the dream I’ve always blueprinted in mind.

Soon...