DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED

By MICHAEL PERKINS

WHEN I HEAR PEOPLE WINGEING ON ABOUT the “romance” of the vanishing platform known as the newspaper, I immediately recall two familiar images of just how fast the immediacy of any media forum withers on the vine. One image is of a hobo stuffing yesterdays gazette into his shoes to shore up holes in his soles; the other is of a street vendor using last week’s front page to wrap fish. The point here being that reality, as reported on by anything, anywhere, warps out of context so quickly that it can seem to mock the very ways by which we tried to record its passing. Photographs, of course, are not resistant to this phenomenon, but they can serve as a chronicle of how very hot, and how very transient, all our fashions proved to be.

“Hi, Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi, Barbie…”

This image is not even a year old, and it already seems…strange. 2023’s tidal wave of Barbie-ism is on track to rival the hula hoop and line dancing to Achy, Breaky Heart as something that briefly enthralled a public starved for distraction, then dissolved as quick as Splenda in hot coffee. I actually shot this image on my way out of a showing of Greta Gerwig’s delightful sendup/homage to America’s Real First Lady, and the group seen here was queueing up to catch the next screening. The power of the movie was one thing, but its ability to create spontaneous social riffs like this “hey, let’s all dress up like cowgirls, but with pink hats” variant. Were all these women longtime friends? Did they, in their individual lives, actually fulfill the various alternate ambitions of Business Barbie, Mom Barbie, Astronaut Barbie, Dr. Barbie? Or was this merely a moment of what-the-hell-let’s-do-it? The photo does what many pictures do: it reveals everything about “the time” and not much about the people living in it.

A famous news photo of the 1920’s showed a young flapper, bobbed hair and all, using a pencil to thumb through a miniature dictionary mounted on her wrist like a bracelet. The book was a handy way to search for possible solutions to clues in her daily pursuit of crossword puzzles, which had, in that decade, recently been introduced to feverish delight among the novelty-hungry kids of the Jazz Age. Through that photograph, we see a day of future passed, a world largely vanished, leaving only a fading picture to tell its story. Most of the news of the day will, indeed, eventually be used to mentally “wrap fish”, but pictures can remind us that not all of it deserved to be stuffed into our shoes.