It started with a shirt box. The kind from the 50’s that our fathers used, the kind you might have seen in an early episode of Mad Men.

The box migrated from the bottom drawer of the bureau to the top of the wardrobe when he moved in with his daughter. When he died she opened the box and his memories flooded forth into the ethers, from shirt box to inbox. The pictures brought us, the first cousins, back together- not having seen each other since we were children, we have just celebrated our fifth 1st cousin reunion. Our mothers, three sisters, and their husbands, three fathers, would have delighted in this. Perhaps our grandmother and her two sisters dreamed us into being that day they stepped aboard the steamer bound from Galway Bay for Ellis Island over a century before.

What I love about photographs is how they capture a moment forever- how you can look deeply into an image until it comes back alive again. That is what I loved about being a documentary editor too, stringing images together until there was life to them again. And it is what I love about books- words telling stories, creating images in our minds. We are amazing creatures are we not?

It reminds me of those summer nights in childhood when my brother and I used to camp out on the front lawn. After we pitched our canvas pup tent, we would point our flashlights into the night sky so the beams would circle the earth for all time, or so our father told us. A little ray of light, a memory, a photograph… of the past made present.

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on a summer’s day long past