Me and a Fish (Circa 1960) – A One Shot Story

One of my most vivid memories of growing up on Twenty Mile Stream Road in Proctorsville, Vermont, is of pulling that brook trout out of the small brook that flowed in back of our house. This picture was the ultimate result of fishing success. But that is not what I want to focus on.

Instead, I direct your attention to the background, the place we referred to as the “mountain.” Back then, it was all pasture, the location where I, my siblings and my best friend whose parents owned the land, spent countless hours playing. These, of course, were the days long before the internet, cell phones, video games and the like, a time when kids relied on their imagination to entertain themselves. This place that I so fondly remember is now, some 65 years later, overgrown, essentially a forest.

One of my biggest regrets is that a photographic record scarcely exists of the decades in which I grew up, the 50s, 60s and early 70s. Sure, I have my memories but can you imagine the interest I and perhaps others would have if more photos had been taken during that time? I’m not talking merely of images of me, family members or neighbors, but also of our house, the neighbors’ dwellings and the surrounding landscape. Like so many people back then, my parents took pictures only on special occasions and then only of people.

I look at this picture and though I love it, I can also see it as a lost opportunity to capture a broader context of where we lived. Imagine if my father had taken a horizontal image with me pushed back and off to the side? So much more could have been captured. Instead, my father placed me front and center in a narrow field of view.

This sounds like a criticism of my father’s photographic technique. I’m not really intending it as such. I probably would have done something similar and so would many parents if placed in a similar situation. After all, this moment was in his eyes mostly about me, his son, and my moment of angling success.  Additionally, I don’t remember the camera my father used but it was undoubtedly a primitive one.  Perhaps this picture was about the best anyone could do with it.

It easy when taking a picture to think only of the moment in which we click the shutter. But, when you think about it, most every image we take is potentially of historical, if not at least sentimental, interest. What seems like an ordinary capture at the time we press the shutter button may become something else, 50, 100 or 150 years later.

I’m sure my father was not thinking about what family members might think 65 years later when looking at this image or what we might wish had been included. He never could have imagined this simple snapshot on an ordinary day in Vermont would decades later be displayed to the world on something called the internet.  Any historical or sentimental interest that it might accrue with the passage of time probably was not a consideration. Though this is a treasured image and a look back at a time so different from our own, it still makes me sad that a little more was not accomplished photographically during this brief moment in my time on this planet.

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