Family Photo Forensics

Margaret made a deep dive into storage boxes to make an album of photographs of our family. She has finished up the project with the pictures we have from when our two dughters first started their own families. One of the pictures which shows me sitting at my desk in our house on Skyway in Las Cruces is a real time capsule. Margaret pointed out to me that the photo was made when I was at the age where our oldest daughter is now.

At first glance, I thought Margaret must have made the photo with our Pentax Spotmatic. That imprinted date in the lower right corner, however, belies that thought. I am pretty sure now that the picture was made with a Pentax IQZoom which I bought for Margaret around that time. It was a miserable camera which only worked for a short time; it went into the trash and would not have been recoverable in memory had it not been for the saved snapshot. 

 The one book title I can read clearly in the picture is Using PC Dos. Immeditely to the right is my IBM pc clone from those days. I bought two of those, one for my own use and one for a project funded by the the New Mexico Social Workers organization to set up a Fidonet computer bulletin board system (bbs) which a professor and I ran from his office at NMSU. I ran the social worker's bbs for several years, and also operated a personal one from my own pc over a second home phone line. In that same year, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and created the first web browser. A couple years later we abandoned the bbs and I set up a web page for the social workers and operated that for a couple more years. 

 On the wall above the pc is a picture of a petroglyph at Lucero Arroyo, a few mile north of Las Cruces. I'm not sure if that photo was made with the Spotmatic or the IQZoom. I made a lot of pictures of petroglyphs in those days as I wandered around in the Chihuahuan desert in southern New Mexico with the help of that map to the right which depicts the BLM land throughout the state. Many of those photographs were incorporated into a web site which I called Sacred Places: New Mexico Rock Art. I closed down that site when I found that it was a lot easier to post my thoughts on a Google Blog, but the Sacred Places site lives on as an addendum to Mike Eckman's web site about film photography.

I suspect there is quite a bit more history that might be gleaned from that photo. The 4x6 print is not very good quality, but a bigger enlargement of the negative (if I could find it) would likely make more of the book titles legible. I would probably be able to see at least the date and headlines of that copy of the Las Cruces Sun News. Maybe I could even make out the time on my watch, and the subject of those paragraphs on the computer screen.