Americans Abroad — Photos We Love
The image is off center, the lighting flawed, and the photo grainy. My father was an avid amateur photographer and in my mind’s eye he captures the scene with a one-use flash, slips the still-warm bulb into his pocket, and inserts another. Then, after retrieving his olive-studded martini glass from the table with his free hand, he disappears into the crowd to capture another vignette.
After the party, in his dark room, my father will examine the 35 millimeter slide and discover he’s blown out the center of the photo and left the margins dark. Still, there’s something about the image that captures his imagination. He places the slide in a tray with others he keeps for a lifetime.
The now rusted-metal slide casing bears the date December 1954 written in his hand on a sliver of tape. That year my family lived abroad on an Air Force base in Bitburg, Germany.
I was too young to see the party in the photo firsthand. But later, during another tour abroad, I witnessed some of the many parties held in the expatriate community. The Americans often gathered at one or another military or civilian home. They needed no holiday for an excuse to come together, instead they celebrated birthdays and anniversaries, a new family’s arrival or another’s departure, or simply to have fun while preserving a bit of the America they remembered.
When my parents hosted a party, my siblings and I would huddle on the balcony, peering through the balusters to the festivities below. We would sit until well past our bedtimes, cross-legged, quiet, being neither seen nor heard while ogling the hairdos, jewelry, and cocktail dresses or the elaborate themed costumes and imagine ourselves grown and attending our own parties.
The photo, even though from an earlier time, brings back those memories. Though a silent witness, the sound of men and women’s voices, the clink of flatware on china, and toasts from cocktail glasses holding Gimlets, Manhattans and Whisky sours burst from the film. Music plays Glenn Miller, Count Basie, or Tony Bennett. And Frank Sinatra, no doubt.
In the instant captured beneath the warm glow of fiberglass lampshades, three people fill their plates from a buffet line. A man in a gray suit speaks to a man ahead of him. The second man, looks down, and though his face is not visible, I suspect he is smiling. The woman to their right draws my eye. Wearing an orange cocktail dress and jewelry that sparkles at her neck and on her ear lobes, she smiles. Has she overheard the clever conversation behind her? Is there someone ahead who has caught her fancy?
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” — Elliott Erwitt
This slide was among hundreds in boxes my father had put away in a spare room before he moved. Lacking a slide projector, I lifted each one from their gray or tortoise shell plastic trays and held them to the light. Most were of people or places I did not recognize, and I tossed them away.
But, I saved this one, seeing in the particular moment more than a buffet line of fancy dressed men and women. I sensed the camaraderie of the American expatriates in a foreign land and the joy in the occasion they celebrated. It is a photo, too, of a time gone by — a time that will not be experienced again in the same way, never as care free as then or at least as care free as I imagined my parents and their friends and lives to be.
The photo tantalizes me particularly at this time of year, when we reflect on the year just ending or of more distant memories before turning to thoughts of the future. Pessimists among us believe the world has changed and times like these will never be again, the hopeful see more good times ahead. Some days I’m in the first camp, but today I’m in the latter, assembling my own buffet table, not quite as elaborate, not quite as formal, but full of laughter, china clinking, good times, and smiles. I might even put on Sinatra.
Rona Simmons
www.ronasimmons.com
@rona_simmons
This article appeared originally on The Huffington Post 12/23/16
