Passed and Present by Allison Gilbert

Author:Allison Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781580056137
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2016-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

The Association of Personal Historians offers a directory of its members and the services they offer on its website: www.personalhistorians.org.

39.

Fabricate History

Stephanie Rich never met her grandfather. But nearly eighty years after he spent a summer traipsing through Europe in 1931, she set out to replicate his journey. For three months during the summer of 2009, Rich, traveling solo and armed with photocopies of snapshots her grandfather took on vacation, embarked on a “lifelong dream of retracing his steps and taking matching photographs at the exact locations he had visited,” she wrote in her kindhearted travelogue, A Followed Path: Travels with My Grandfather.

The trip wouldn’t be easy; Leo Rich had visited England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Italy. Nor would be her goal of replicating all his photos; while he documented nearly 180 of his pictures, many were of places that would be hard to pinpoint—a random canal in Venice, or an uncited photo taken of the vast Dolomites. But in the end, Rich managed to find most of the same bridges and overlooks where her grandfather had once stood. She also walked the same streets, meandered through the same piazzas, and sat in the same churches, museums, and gardens. In every location she replicated, as closely as she could, the photo her grandfather had taken seventy-eight years earlier.

Rich recalls her trip as a successful mission. With her grandfather serving as tour director, Rich allowed “an incredibly important figure in my life to guide me as if he were still alive today, as if he knew me and knew what I would enjoy, what would open my eyes and what would have a profound impact on me.” The experience, she reflected, “was the closest I’ve ever felt to someone watching over me.”

A Followed Path is a fantastic example of how technology can be used to build connections between generations. And the book’s juxtaposition of her grandfather’s black and white photographs with Rich’s color, high-resolution shots is deeply moving. While Leo Rich introduced Stephanie to the Palace of Fontainebleau and Lake Como, with today’s technology, it is as if Stephanie were able to introduce her grandfather to twenty-first-century Europe as well.

For the technologically inclined, there’s also the possibility of bridging generations by using the software program Adobe Photoshop. To help the younger set see for themselves the physical traits they’ve inherited from family members, start with a good facial-depicting photo from contrasting generations, one younger and one elder. Then edit the images together so it appears they were taken at the same time. With the resulting product, the newest generation will be able to observe something extraordinary—they actually do have “Grandma’s smile” and “Uncle Willie’s” eyes!

This project is also remarkably fun for adults. I asked Rich if she ever thought about Photoshopping an image together of her and Grandpa Leo. Her enthusiastic response suggested that project might be next.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.