The "Living A Dream" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  And then I began to read...The human eye sees, the finger moves, the shutter eye blinks behind its cold lens and light explodes against the film.  Then the moment is gone. But locked now in chemical memory is a recollection of it, a fragrant of time waiting to be coaxed back into two-dimensional existence, a paper-thin proof that something happened, that somebody was.  Surely there is little more to most of photography than that--a chain of simple, physical events triggered by a brain's desire to make the present stand still.  Yet, beyond the simplicity of its making, the image fixed by man and camera burns with a meaning and an immortality of its own.  You have just read part of the leading paragraph in Life Magazine's 30th Anniversary Special Double Issue titled PHOTOGRAPHY.  The magazine is dated Vol. 61, No. 26, Dec. 23, 1966.  The mailing label shows the owner of the  magazine to be a woman living in Hamburg, PA.  And...just how did I manage to be holding it as I read the first paragraph of the magazine?  My brother, Steve, knew I would love to have it as soon as he saw it in the pile of old magazines he was putting out for his garage sale this past weekend.  

As soon as I got home I began reading the Two-In-One Issue which sold for 60 cents when it was first released.  I have always enjoyed taking photographs, even as a child.  I took a few courses in photography as a student at Millersville State Teacher's College and eventually taught black and white photography for both senior boys and girls at Manheim Township High School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  I was able to teach photography to my three children as they went through Manheim Township with my youngest son becoming a professional photographer for a few years before he became a pressman for a local printing company.  The entire magazine is geared toward photography with articles that carried names such as The Voices of the Photograph, Nature's Astonishing Lenses, Man Fixes the Image, How Pictures Should be Taken, The Sunny World of the Amateur, The Camera Today: Indispensable Tool, Beyond the Bounds of Man's Vision, and Anywhere and Everywhere for the Story.  The final story was titled The Power of Seeing and features a portfolio of 20 contemporary photographs, all naturally taken in black and white.  The cover of the magazine features a closeup of a human eye that was taken from four inches away and looks right into the living eye from the side.  I spent hours reading all the stories and viewing all the photographs including an 1826 photograph taken by Claude Niéce which is said to be the very first black and white photograph ever taken.

Photo by Claude Niéce

Articles titled Nature's Astonishing Lenses, Man Fixes the Image, The Sunny World of the Amateur, Beyond the Bounds of Man's Vision and The Power of Seeing are just a few of the many stories in the issue.  I have read the magazine through with plans to begin and go through it at least one more time.  I have learned so much from reading the stories and only wish I was still teaching my classes in photography.  I could have added another class in photography history after reading all the stories.  Have to remember to thank my brother again for thinking of me when he pulled the magazine out of the pile to save for me.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

A page inside the magazine