Capturing a Life in Black and White
My grandmother is dying, and I am making her a photo album
Alone in my parents’ house, I hunt through drawers and boxes for old photos — the older, the better. Square snapshots from the 60s, edged in white, colored as though they were drawn in soft colored pencil. Black-and-white photos from the 40s and 50s, with names written on the back in my great-grandmother’s loopy blue fountain pen. Childhood photos of my mother, out-of-focus pictures of Yorkshire terriers, and a photo of my grandmother herself — young, red-haired, gorgeous, wearing a strapless bathing suit and a pair of cat-eye sunglasses, smiling from a poolside lounge chair with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
I gather up all of the photographs in a plastic shopping bag and drive twenty minutes into town to find the nearest color Xerox machine. I focus on the mechanics — how many photos fit on a page? How many pages can the plastic presentation book hold? I know I can’t bring the originals to the nursing home — the risk of losing them is too great. But I try to make sure the copies are as crisp and clear as possible. With a fine-tipped marker, I mark up the color copies, captioning as many of the photos as I can.
A decade ago, I sat on the floor of my grandmother’s house, holding up old photographs, insisting she…
