Life in a Shoe Box (E248)

Life in a Shoe Box

For those of you that know me and visited my studio, know that if you walk into it, it will be some kind of a museum. My shelves are lined up with old radios, maybe a dozen and a half or so. And then, two more shelves of old cameras. Old SLRs I still use, film cameras that I have traveled the world with. And the one I treasure the most: my dad’s old movie cameras, 8 millimeters and some others. The cameras I remember from my childhood, the one that my dad used to film us growing up.

I enjoy photography very much. My house is full of enlargements of photos from my travel. I am imagining that photography has been in the DNA of my family for generations. My dad actually took a lot of photos, thousands of them. He left specific instructions in his will; he told my siblings and me to preserve every photo he ever took, and we did. We scanned over, I guess, 120 albums and over 10,000 photos. 10,000 moments of laughter, travel, quiet afternoons, family gatherings, various celebrations, and many, many more occasions.

To us, they are true treasure. They are the map of who my dad was. We scanned the photos and boxed the original albums with the photos. And then I remembered: I walked into a market in Denver, Colorado, not too long ago and I saw something that stopped me cold. Down on the floor, in the corner of a stall, was an old cardboard box. It was overflowing with black and white photos. Some of them had spilled out of the box into the sidewalk. I watched as people walked by and stepping on photos of strangers from another time.

I leaned down and picked up one of the photos. It was a beautiful couple somewhere in Europe, maybe Italy or France. And on the back, in faded ink, it just said ‘With Love.’ No name, no date, no numbers. Just a sentiment that was once someone’s most precious possession. And it hit me: at one point or another, that photo was the center of the world. Someone kept it in a wallet, or maybe framed it on a nightstand, and now? Now it’s in a box on the street. Some of the photos are being stepped on, and it’s someone’s life that seems to be faded away with the wind.

I started thinking about my dad’s photos and my own photos, the ones that I took before I went totally digital. Will these photos end up in a shoebox too one day? Is that where we all go? Just faded images in a box of things nobody wants anymore? I don’t know. I just felt some kind of a sadness thinking about this beautiful couple in the black and white photo.

And then I started thinking again how music is so different. While photos are still, they stay where you leave them. If you don’t look at them, they stay dark. But music? Music fills the air. It doesn’t sit in a box. The moment you play a song, it becomes alive again. It’s in the room, it’s with you. It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 years old or 100 years old. A melody doesn’t fade out like a black and white print or a photo. Music is meant to be shared and embraced; to be passed on from ear to ear. You can’t step on a song, and the music stays with you. It’s inside you long after the camera has been put away.

So I hope you will enjoy the lineup that I have prepared for you today. It’s an incredible compilation of great music that I’m sure you will enjoy. Stay with me for the next couple of hours.”