Trawling the Past

Over the last few weeks, I've been involved in a project that has to do with photographic archives covering the period from the Second World War to the present. The idea was to identify specific people and their environments and then consider how those people and their environments had changed over that period.

The problem really was one of selection. The final archive had to be reduced to about 160 photographs (well, maybe 180). It had to be representative of the whole collection. Well, it's not. It tends to cluster. In some periods, people took a lot of photographs. In some, not so many or not at all. Sigh.

It is like going fishing, and pulling up the nets, and finding all kinds of weird fish and having rich patches of good fish and long periods with no fish at all. It also puts me in mind of what Isaac Asimov said in his novella 'The Dead Past' — he said that the past begins an instant before the present; in effect, we are already living in the past by the time we become aware of the present.

And that is why, when you trawl the past with the nets of information gathering, you might even catch yourself by surprise...