Mirror With a Mystery

My pursuit of "Lost Relatives"

Meet Herr und Frau Kubrickaugen.

I don’t know their names, and I am no longer certain that they’re German. But I know Kubrick eyes when I see them, and ever since I saw those eyes glaring out from my computer monitor, they’ve been the Kubrickaugens.

I enjoy my old photographs. I collect them, scan them, and share them on the web. As hobbies go, this one is harmless, inexpensive, and entertaining. But its allure is not always easy to explain to those who don’t “get it” right off the bat. And to be honest, sometimes I don’t get it myself. Most of my collection is decidedly low-value. I have a few daguerreotypes and a lot of tintypes, but what I really love is old negatives. Handling negatives brings me closer to both the photographer and the subjects than scanning prints. The silvery negative deposits on the glass or film I’m holding are the direct result of light rays bouncing off someone’s face over a century ago and passing through the lens to the back of the camera. It feels as close to time travel as one can get.

Oliver Wendell Holmes I famously declared in 1859 that a photograph is a “mirror with a memory.” These old photos have become detached from their memories. They are mirrors with mysteries. And those mysteries are a big part of the fun of these old photos. I have a handful of photos of famous people doing things that you can read about in the papers. Those photos’ secrets are easily revealed—in part at least. But in most of my photos the subject and the photographer are unknown. When you have a single image, a portrait say, without the many images in the family album it was taken from, the mysteries all revolve around what can be gleaned from that one picture. The mysteries multiply when you have a collection of dozens of photos where the many faces appear again in different settings (a birthday party here, a trip to a park there), and which depict those faces over many years. As you get drawn in you start aching for the stories of these “lost relatives.” You begin conducting genealogy without names. A more lighthearted approach is to turn to creating fictions about your subjects, like Paul Simon and Kathy on that bus playing games with the faces.

I don’t remember the garage sale where I picked up the five boxes of glass plate negatives that once belonged to the K family.

But I was excited to start scanning them, even though my negative scanner was not made for 9 x 12 cm negatives. The first image I scanned was Frau Kubrickaugen in the kitchen, standing beside an immaculate gas oven with stove.

I immediately started writing a story. She is posed just left of the stove as if she’s tending a pot on the fire, but she’s turned three-quarters toward us, like a magazine ad housewife demonstrating her new Amana stove. Has the photographer asked his wife to direct her gaze above our sightline?

The K’s appear to have had two kids, very close in age, and, I think, pretty photogenic.

Herr K took his photography hobby seriously. I some of the selfies he seems to be focused on the camera. Was he worrying that the autotimer was not going to go off?

Several images have Mrs. K dressing up or posing with friends in makeshift backdrops. More stories, more mysteries.

He also enjoyed trick photography. This is a composite I made from the two shots he took to create an image of him looking around a tree at a woodland nymph (Mrs. K hamming up the flirtatiousness, much further off but framed to appear touching the tree.)

Then there’s this creepy Christmas photo. Mrs. K. sits beside the decorated Christmas tree. Above her is Mr. K, or a ghostly vision of him, as he seems translucent in places. A pretty smart in-camera double-exposure trick!

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I always assumed the K’s were Western European. I presumed German—though I may have been prejudiced by one of the boxes holding the negatives being from the German photo paper manufacturer Mimosa, based in Dresden. But there were other hints. This picture of the couple tapping eggs, which I mistakenly thought was a German Easter tradition (but turns out to be well-nigh universal—I mean who doesn’t like a friendly egg tapping?!)

Or the Christmas tree decorations in that ghostly image? The 8-pointed tree topper bears the inscription "Er wird unser Friede sein" (He will be our Peace). So I went along for years “knowing” it was Herr und Frau Kubrickaugen.

The end of that certainty has been a fun and humbling experience. It began years after I scanned and posted the first pictures. Coming back to the boxes I came along this image (unique in the collection as the only film negative). Mrs. K posing with a car.

But that license doesn’t look European, and a sharp-eyed viewer of the uploaded image on my Flickr site identified the car as a 1928 Chandler—a distinctly American car.

And just a week or so ago I posted this image on my Bluesky timeline, hoping someone might recognize the tower.

Within minutes someone shot back that it is the Eden Park water tower in Cincinnati!

OK, I thought. That’s just fine. I don’t have to give up on the “Frau and Herr.” It’s hard to find an American city more German than Cincinnati. Of course all I know is that they had an American car in the late 20s and took a picture of a parkway in Cincinnati. Were they in the States in all the pictures or did they emigrate at some point?

This collection of negatives is far from revealing all its secrets.

There’s a lot more to be scanned, and a lot more inquiries to make. But I enjoy the process, and especially the help I get from those in the know.

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