So, for this assignment, I had to locate a photo of a couple and provide a back story. I looked in this case for an older couple because I feel like they have more noteworthy love stories. When I selected the image, it was odd to see where it originated because the story it was from is not at all the story I had in mind when I saw it, so don’t click the link unless you want to spoil the fun. Other than being an older couple, that it was shot from behind makes the subjects someone nondescript, and to me, that means that their story is far more open ended than a photo where facial expressions and looks are included. Faces tell stories all their own, so I wanted different elements of this story to speak to me.
William, his friends call him Bill, and his wife Margaret, who refuses to allow her name to be shortened, have been married since their early twenties. They met at a gathering of Bill’s brother, and after a shot bit of conversation, realized that she was a nurse at an army medic camp in Vietnam where he had stayed for several weeks recovering from a military career ending injury, and that he had been there once prior for another injury that won him a purple heart but had recovered and gone back to his unity. She treated him on both occasions, but he was out when she had and he did not recall. They still joke that if he had just woke up and seen her the first time, he wouldn’t have had to lose the use of his left arm when God decided to play matchmaker a second time, and that if had woke up the second time, they wouldn’t have had to endure Bill’s Brother’s wife’s cooking at that party.
This assignment was useful because it caused me to think about the way in which images have lives and stories of their own. Like some more abstract poetry or music, they don’t necessarily have a concrete meaning to convey. Images can mean a million things to a million people, and accordingly, good photographs have their own merit outside of what they literally depict.
