I wrote yesterday about the site Square America which is a great collection of everyday photography of all sorts from the last century. I came across this photo in one of the galleries, Down By The Tracks, which features photos of railways and railway adjacent places. This photo just caught my eye and made me stop.
It filled me with an inexorable sadness. I’ve sat for a while looking at this photo and can’t fully explain how it makes me feel other than to say that.
The fading from age and probably a flawed camera or poor processing give this photo a ghostly feel, as though you’re watching lost spirits wandering in search of a final place to rest. The fact that you can’t see the faces give this piece a greater sense of anonymity and the posture of the lady in the rear, with her arms set straight down as she shuffles forward, feels like hopelessness.
It’s an odd little picture and one that raises many more feelings than probably was meant when it was snapped those many years back. There was probably at one point a series of photos that accompanied this photo and gave it context, filled out some sort of narrative for the people in and around the scene. But taken from this context it becomes ghostly and forlorn for me.
I wonder where they were heading and why they were walking the tracks. Why did someone take a photo like this?
Redtree Times 