![](\"http:\/\/oook.info\/images\/Joerndt1.jpg\")
(this is just a beginning of a continuing Saga)
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\nPhotographs from the past ENCODE messages that may\/can resonate across time. In fact, that’s how they work, in a sort of temporal accordion (folded up and hidden until the bellows are tugged open, then producing stored\/implied\/immanent\/nascent SOUND). Above is a photo of my maternal grandparents, whom I have never<\/b> seen pictures of. It arrived in my life this week (indirectly, from a first cousin once removed whom I’ve never met) and I’ve been working on investigating and unpacking the story it tells, and the Story it is a fragment of evidence within.<\/p>\n
\nI have spent many many happy hours in the company of the Abandoned Ancestors<\/a> of others, and also in my own trove of family photographs, passed down into my curatorship from earlier generations. The pleasure\/game\/discipline of reading<\/b> images, of excavating stories, imputing personality and other characteristics, and connecting up the (sometimes fanciful) dots … is bottomless and basically harmless to anybody now living, or so I tell myself.<\/p>\n \n \nThe people are: Carl Kikkebusch, Mary Joerndt, Harriet Joerndt Kikkebusch, and William Henry Joerndt. <\/center>Harriet is my mother’s elder sister (by 9 years). I “know” bits about each of these four people, though the knowledge is somewhat suspect, or at least heavily inflected, by (1) what I remember of (2) what my mother (who died in 1972) told me about her family of origin, (3) what my sister Alice (who died in 2010) told me, and (4) what I’ve deduced for myself from such family papers as I preside over… and in the last week, (5) a lively correspondence with my sister’s oldest nephew (is he my nephew-in-law? There’s no Nacirema kinship term for the relationship). <\/p>\n \nWhat can we read from the photo? How would backstory<\/b> enlarge our reading? Where does this photo fit in the catalog of genres of vernacular photographs and snapshots? [people and cars…] <\/p>\n \n<\/p>\n![\"Four](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/35\/69870617_f8dd8a8ec1_n.jpg\")
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