2021 – Mom Shoots the World – Part 1
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on November 2, 2021)
On this – the day my father would have celebrated his 100th birthday – I celebrate his lovely bride…………….more specifically, her eye.
Yeah, I’ve already posted pictures of them everywhere, but my parents are not in any of these. She saw these scenes and captured them……..on print film (ugh!). I should mention she’s won a few photo contests – mostly in the Womens’ Club.
The gaudy background in the opening image is from a Capri shoebox that contains – among other photographic items – 273 small prints.
From this lot, I picked out these 86 images:
I really didn’t want have to scan 86 separate items, so I created little groups whose commonalities included subject matter and location. That got the load down to a more-reasonable 32 scans, each having 1-6 photos in them.
But because Mom used crappy print film with all kinds of horrible color casts and sharpness issues to overcome, 84 edits were required. That took a lot of time, but it was certainly for a good cause.
I’m presenting them as sequentially as I can (some multi-image scans have different years in them, so I’ll go by the first year listed in those scans) with one exception: the first year shall go last for reasons I’ll explain later.
Click to enlarge (not all of them).
Hawaii, 1972 – Pineapple Rainbow (sounds like an ice cream flavor):
Spain, 1973 – Everything looked red with this film. I took a lot of it out, but taking any more out would have made them black-and-white. Interesting note with the first photo………….you can bet that she sent them a copy.
Not sure what’s in the second photo’s carts…………fishing nets?
Quick! What’s going on in the third photo?
The answer:
1977, ’78 ’79, 81 – No idea where she shot the first one. Small print under “In The Bag” says “quality handbags”……………icebags, maybe.
The ’78 one says, “Smithsonian – eating signs from all nations”. She then identifies the person on the right as her sister Joan, which makes sense since Joan lived in nearby northern Virginia.
No location given on the ’79 one, but it sure looks like NYC, where they need heavy equipment to pick up old Beetles.
The ’81 picture was taken in somewhere in Norway. The Van Halen brothers – by the way – were born in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
1981, ’83 – More reddish film…………I wonder if modest Mom was covering her eyes when she took these. The first four were taken in Oslo, Norway, in 1981. The last one – David by Michelangelo (angle by Eunice) – was taken in Florence, Italy, in 1983:
1982 Tennessee, Colorado – The three on the left were taken in Tennessee; the three on the right in Colorado.
Tennessee – Nashville, Knoxville (World’s Fair), Nashville (Sun Records! All right, Mom!)
Colorado – USAF Academy (just north of Colorado Springs), to Pike’s Peak, taken from Pike’s Peak:
Before and after……..HAD to get rid of that red sky, but there was no blue/cyan to bring out, so I made the sky B&W. This took a lot of time because the structure has a lot of red in it and I didn’t want to lose that, so there were individual takeouts of red between each peak – pain in the ass, but worth it:
1983 – Rome (4):
Venice, Rome:
1983,4 – Holy Trinity Church, Hackensack, NJ
1984 – London shop window 9-12-84, Germany (On the Rhine 9-14-84) and in Paris 9-21-84:
Unknown location 10-7-84
1984, ’85 , ’95 Waterfalls – ’84 unknown location, ’85 Kyoto, Japan, ’95 New Zealand
1985 Far East Itinerary:
1985 Hong Kong (3), Macau (1 – St Paul’s Church):
1985 Bangkok (4):
1986 – California wind farms (3 – from a moving car):
1986 – Utah (3), Arizona (1 – Glen Canyon Dam):
1986, ’90, ’92 – LOCAL Disgusting-looking pumpkin, Mom’s neighbors watering lawns at sunset, from MY roof in Hackensack (Holy Trinity Church dome in the background):
1988, 1992 – Fire hydrants in Natchez, MS and unknown location:
1990 – Four in British Columbia, Canada
1993 – Nephews picking Lady Liberty’s nose 4-22-93:
1993 – Mom needed a break from caring for Dad, so I took her to a place I knew she’d love: the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY. (think huge sculptures on a big golf course) – a great place!:
1993 & 1996 – The Leafe house after a 1996 snow storm, icicles by my old bedroom window in 1993, the back yard in 1996:
1994 – No idea where, but it’s dated 4-20-94:
1995 – 10-1 & 11-30-95 (No idea where and Denver):
Melbourne, Australia, Central Shopping Centre 11-12-95:
Melbourne & Sydney 11-12,9,10-95 (Melbourne Central Shopping Centre, Luna Park and somewhere else in Sydney):
Overlanders Steakhouse, Alice Springs, Australia, bathroom doors 11-13-95:
Hackett’s Bungy (that’s how they spell it) Jump, Queenstown, New Zealand 11-26-95:
11-29, 27-95 New Zealand looks like a fun place:
Well, that’s just about all………..but wait, I have a couple of leftover pictures from…………1969? Oh yeah – that first year that’s going last.
The pictures aren’t very good – a distant shot of the George Washington Bridge and an even more distant shot of the Manhattan skyline:
Then I flipped them over:
Well, whaddaya know………..it DID sink in when I played this single a bazillion times in my room when I was 15:
(short excerpt)
So, yeah – “Part 1” means there’s a “Part 2” because in that same Capri shoebox, I found two Kodak slide boxes and there’s some really good stuff in them. It also means I have a TON of scanning ahead of me – probably more than for this one – so it’s gonna take some time.
Fortunately, what would have been Eunice’s 99th birthday is a week before Christmas, so I WILL get it done by then.
I hope y’all aren’t getting sick of this.
You know I gotta do it, right?
I want to see your nephews pick the nose of the real Statue Of Liberty. Do you think they are up to climbing all the way up there at their current ages?!
Well, let’s see……..they’re only in their early 30s now………….yeah, I think they could handle it.
Please get photos if this really happens!
No problem!
Brian (nephew in green jacket) took his family to NYC a few years ago. He asked for this picture and recreated it with his daughter Charlotte.