One night in Fargo after everyone had gone to sleep, I poked through an old bureau in the basement. It had spent most of its life at my Grandparent’s home on the farm in Harwood. One drawer held some photo albums - the pages were cracked, falling out of the book, and half the pictures were gone - they'd become unglued and dropped to an indifferent floor decades before. But a few could be pried loose, and I took them back to Minneapolis to scan and preserve. The more I looked at them, the more I realized that they were absolutely inscrutable - aside from my grandparents, the people in these pictures are unknown to me. Chances are I stood in many of the spots where these pictures were taken, drove across the land where the farming scenes were photographed. Were it not for the faces - my grandfather’s face, which stares back at me from the mirror sometimes when I am tired, or my grandmother’s face that looks very much like the beta version of my Mom - these would mean nothing, aside from some sort of historical value.
But I do know the faces, and that makes all the difference. You, of course, do not - yet you might find these interesting nonetheless. It’s a small portion of a record a young farm wife made of her times with her camera. That she took her hoby seriously isn’t in doubt - look at the picture above. She had to get dressed in winter clothes - no small feat - and trudge through the snow to the back of the barn to get that shot. She wanted these things to be remembered. And so they are.
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