📸 The Photograph Test
Snapshots from life and the memories that accompany them
In the interest of getting to know each other a bit more, I thought I’d do a little exercise in show and tell this week, facilitated by a fictional AI interlocutor. Hello Cheeky Chatbot.
🤖 Is this strictly necessary?
Well, I thought it would—
🤖 The test begins now. The subject will review five photographs, culled from cloud storage, defunct accounts, and external hard drives. Each photograph represents a period of time in the subject’s lifespan, and is representative, although not definitive, of each period. The subject will assess the significance of each.
PHOTOGRAPH 1: Youth
Ah, a memento from our family ventriloquism act.
🤖 Be serious, or at least funnier.
Sheesh. Ok, no, this is a perfectly nice photo of my parents and me. It’s a normal photo, for a normal enough childhood in suburban Philadelphia,1 and it does capture my Big Only Child Energy. What’s notable about it is that, a few years ago, my mom had a fire in her house,2 and in the process of cleaning up all the smoke damage, we lost a lot of things, including a lot of our photos. PSA: Take care of your old photos! It’s sad to think about, but it’s just stuff, and more of it will turn up eventually. Case in point, I found this one on an inactive flickr account. Digital detritus for the win, again.
🤖 Note: reference to “flickr” identifies the subject as an aged millennial. Moving on.
PHOTOGRAPH 2: High school and college
🤖 Ooh, looks like somebody had fun studying abroad in Europe…
I shudder to think about what kind of machine learning taught you to identify this, but you’re right of course. I guess I did a lot of jumping into different things, even when it was a bit incongruous, like in this photo. Along with the people I was traveling with, I thought that the best way to celebrate seeing the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi was by trying to take mid-air jump photos. You know, you could do a version of this list organized by jackets. This era was largely defined by my Swiss Army jacket, complete with epaulets, purchased at a military surplus store in downtown Philadelphia. Much cheaper than a real peacoat, and much less warm. But what it lacked in cool, it made up for in … historical neutrality?
🤖 Some might say the Swiss were the prototype for impartial automated interlocutors.
PHOTOGRAPH 3: Art School
Now this is more like it! I vastly prefer taking photos of things — food, architectural details, flowers — to taking pictures of people.
🤖 However, your wife finds this frustrating, does she not?
How would you know that? But yes. She, like a lot of people, prefers to remember vacations by seeing people she knows doing things. I get it, but this also speaks to my interests as an artist: capturing details, composing an image, drawing backgrounds, etc. This image was from an extremely fun and stressful time. Directly after college, I went to comics school, in Vermont. I learned how to actually draw and I pushed my storytelling skills up several notches. In the second year, we were each given studio space in a former telephone company building. It was a messy hub of creative activity nearly 24/7. That time was great, but Vermont was also very cold and dark.3
🤖 Woah, dark is right, that footnote is no joke.
PHOTOGRAPH 4: Learning to adult
This is from about ten years ago, when Alli and I had just moved in together. In addition to the surroundings, I can date it from the fact that the cats are kittens here, and that Alli is reading one of the Game of Thrones books. I remember listening to the audiobooks in the car on the way down from Vermont. This was the first of three apartments we would share, and it was by far the smallest. It was a “Junior One Bedroom,” or, if you like, a Studio+. However, the location was great, and I loved walking through Kalorama Park. Sure the Obamas live there now, but when we lived in the neighborhood there used to be a guy who would let his tortoise crawl around while he smoked cigarettes.4
🤖 I still haven’t finished A Dance with Dragons.
PHOTOGRAPH 5: Now
🤖 Ah yes, the obligatory wedding photo where the newlyweds walk down a dirty alley.
Listen, decent “action shots” are tough in bridal photography. We got married in 2017, and like a lot of people our age, I feel like we’ve done a lot of growing up since November 2016.
🤖 Why, what happened then?
You can spot a European study abroad from a single photo but you don’t know the significance of this?
🤖 I have pranked you ;)
Your ability to pull off sarcasm does not bode well for the future of automation.
🤖 I’m sure someone will always be willing to pay you to do … whatever this is.
Actually I’m doing this for free, but that’s enough outta you. Since then, Alli and I have spent a long-distance fellowship apart, gotten married, bought a house, and dealt with a few other things. We’ve been luckier than many during Covid, but well, you know how it is. Still, I can’t not smile when I look at this photo. I also think that square photos are great and totally under-appreciated outside of Instagram. I bought this frame at an estate sale, which is a great place to buy frames, by the way.
🤖 Test complete. Compiling…
🤖 This entry will be logged and filed by subject:
-ventriloquism
-jackets
-catalytic converters
-tortoises
-square frames
🤖 Thank you for your participation.
Well that was something. Thank you, I guess.
Readers: Please feel free to reply to this email with a picture from your life. Let me know if I can publish it here, and if you’re up for some gentle ribbing from the Cheeky Chatbot. No pressure!
🤖 I dare you.
Next time: something entirely different in all likelihood!
Wallingford, near Swarthmore. I now know that I was lucky to grow up in an old, leafy, streetcar suburb. Sadly, there were only three Wawas nearby :/
Recently, the house was gutted and flipped, and was sold for at least four times as much with an open plan and granite countertops. Truly a shock if you ever saw it in the last thirty years!
Vermont has a rep for being this liberal paradise, but here’s a real Vermont story: With a foot of snow on the ground, someone shimmied under my car and cut out the catalytic converter to sell the palladium, presumably for meth.
You might know him better as Senator Joe Manchin.