My Weekend in Milwaukee

For years I have been told stories of my grandfather’s basement. There are rooms full of stuff, boxes upon boxes of things, all stored away because grandpa has neither the energy nor the heart to really go through it all. Down in that basement is all of his photography equipment, the photos he took over decades of being a film photographer. He has textbooks from photography school, and glass slides from his time in Pusan during the Korean War.

This weekend I went to visit my grandparents in Wisconsin. By no small miracle grandpa agreed to go through his photography and share some of it with me. I have glass slides from while he was in Korea. In a little over a month I will arrive in Seoul, then Pusan, and later in Tokyo, to capture photographs to be included in a side-by-side photo series of both our work. 

If you don’t understand how this is immediately personal to me, I’m not sure I can explain it. I can only say that one of my grandfather’s greatest fears has always been his basement. He;s afraid that when he dies, all his photography will just be erased, thrown in a dumpster somewhere and quickly forgotten.

The photography my grandfather created, it breathes, and lives, outside of him. I will always have some part of him within these photos. Perhaps it is a part I will barely recognize, that will frustrate me, cause me to question the person I came to know, juxtaposed with the person depicted inside and outside of the frame. The complexity of my grandfather’s identity expands with every slide, and though it will challenge me, inspire many questions about identity, photography, and the image, I look forward to all of it. The worlds these photos explore (both fictionalized and not) are much wanted.