A few years ago, at a flea market a few miles outside of Boone, North Carolina, I came across an album of black-and-white family photographs. It was the oddest and frailest object within a hundred yards. Being a photographer, I noticed it right away—a flimsy album lying beside a dented toaster, its photographs glued onto flaking cardboard pages. Only a few were captioned. Some were missing.
On the first page was a photograph of a handsome, blond-haired young man, looking gawky in a double-breasted suit, standing in front of a Ferris wheel and squinting in the bright sunlight. The caption read, “Billy Atkins, Greenville, North Carolina, 1935.” The photograph was bleached with age, but the man’s discomfort in front of a camera was still evident. Halfway through the album, another blond-haired young man, dressed in an Air Force uniform, stands stiffly beside a single-propeller airplane painted camouflage. The caption read, “Ray Atkins, 1955.” On the last page, a towheaded boy, around ten, straddling a bike on the driveway of a modest, treeless ranch house, frowns sternly into the sun. All three males look somewhat alike, although the boy affects a pout like that of the rock star Jim Morrison, whose image is emblazoned on his T-shirt. The caption beneath the photograph read, “Bobby Atkins, 1970.”
The photographs, vaguely focused, never crisp, might have been taken with a Brownie camera. Sunlight overwhelms the subject in many of them.