THE GIRLS WITH THE ELECTRIC SMILES

THE GIRLS WITH THE ELECTRIC SMILES

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHS AS LEGACY CONSTITUTE REAL WEALTH for us as we age. Heirlooms like jewels, or books, clothing, all contain powerful energy when viewed against the backdrop of the memories of those who have gone before us. However, the accumulated madras quilt of physical images is that backdrop, the most perfect proof we have that these people lived, and loved, and yearned, and strove. That kind of inheritance is truly beyond price, and, in my family, photographs are incredible talismans. They call spirits forth, anew.

My parents were both avid snapshooters as my sister and I were raised. Slides, prints, home movies, framed histories lined all our walls, crammed every cranny atop pianos and nooks and shelves. The visual documentation of our lives not only acted as parameters for our everyday lives as kids, it is now a miraculous comfort for our own old age.

Mother, mid-1940’s.

But photographs have done more for me than just parade my own past experiences before me. They have also granted me entry into the time before my own, to see my parents as children, teenagers, young lovers. To see the bright boys with the cocky attitudes and the gorgeous girls with the electric smiles. Before all the wars, trials, sorrows and slams of grown-up life. Before the world tried to tame them, force them into line, steal their joy. Before they even dreamed of being Mom and Dad.

As it happens, I am writing this on Mother’s Day 2025, but, in practice, these frozen pieces of personal history are truly a part of my daily life. I need all those fresh-faced grins, the unguarded moments caught in a box, the markings of days major and minor in the lives of the people who shaped me. They created, or curated, these photographs for an inheritance they could never have foreseen. But intentional or accidental, they are my legacy, and I cannot imagine life without them.