Cut And Paste

It’s Saturday. Outside, there’s a storm brewing. It may be advisable to stay home and look at the pictures of where we might have been back when the weather was fine. There’s not all that much in that old pile of photographs that screams out for preservation; cut-off heads (mostly) of the people we might have been with. What about those we took in New York? – Nothing. It was so much better just being there, feeling the hot sun on our backs; the smell of the crowd; eating. We felt we were a part of something then – alive.

Still, there are actually parts of all these pictures that could indeed be interesting: The girls that just happened to pop up in a shot at our son’s graduation; the train racing down the track to Washington, DC’s Union Station; the Aristide Maillol sculptures at the Bronx Botanic Garden; Monet’s painting of water lilies at MOMA; the Tomahawk missile at the National Air/Space Museum; etc.

Parts of these pictures that are definitely alright! Tell you what: You have photo shop on your computer, don’t you? Crank it up and use it. You’ve got time. What else are you going to do? Get busy cutting out all the good parts of the pictures you’ve taken and paste them together along with all the other good parts you may have identified. Make a collage of sorts. Watch how it turns out. Keep working and you just might create some kind of “masterpiece” – something that rings truer than all your albums put together.

Since it’s begun to rain, I think I’ll do the same. I invite you to view some of the results. Pretty good, huh?

Actually, I myself have gotten pretty much away from messing with my pictures lately. I might still go so far as to crop them or adjust the contrast, but my “cut and paste” days are pretty much over. The change came with the introduction of the digital camera (which actually makes “cut and pasting” even easier). But, on the other hand, these cameras allow you to take so many more pictures; the odds of capturing something memorable have improved considerably. Deleting the bad ones no longer involves a trip out to the garbage can in the garage.

It’s just that darn roll you shot on Liberty Island years ago. You thought there’d be at least one picture worthy of hanging in the study along side all the bowling trophies. But, when you got them back from CVS, all of them were blurry. It still rankles you no end to have missed the opportunity. And ever since then, you’ve always avoided every opportunity to go back there, preferring instead to nurse the old wound. Why did you keep them anyway, if they were no good? Was it the money? If I had been you, I’d have tossed them long ago and started over.

Peter Koelliker; pkoelliker8@yahoo.com