indago
05-01-2016, 07:41 AM
Teju Cole wrote for The New York Times 26 April 2016:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The photographs were Polaroids, taken between the 1970s and the 2000s. Zun Lee bought them at flea markets, at garage sales or on eBay. Most of them depicted African-Americans: people wearing stylish clothes, relaxing in the yard, celebrating birthdays. A few depicted people in prison uniforms. All the photographs had somehow been separated from their original owners and had become what Lee calls “orphaned Polaroids.” ...Who took these photos? Who do they depict? ...In Lee’s case, the story of his orphaned Polaroids took a surprising turn. When he uploaded some of them to Facebook, the social network’s facial-recognition technology immediately began to match them with real people.
...A few years ago, I bought a cache of photographs from a thrift store in Brooklyn, 35 or so pictures that I selected out of a pile of hundreds. ...Twenty-two of the pictures I bought that day featured the same woman at different stages in her life. She was sometimes alone and sometimes with family. But there she was, in picture after picture, from as far back as the late 1930s until at least 1980. ...I had the sense that my possession of these pictures was not their ideal posterity. They should be in the keeping of people who knew this woman, who cared about her.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
article (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/magazine/the-digital-afterlife-of-lost-family-photos.html?ref=todayspaper)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The photographs were Polaroids, taken between the 1970s and the 2000s. Zun Lee bought them at flea markets, at garage sales or on eBay. Most of them depicted African-Americans: people wearing stylish clothes, relaxing in the yard, celebrating birthdays. A few depicted people in prison uniforms. All the photographs had somehow been separated from their original owners and had become what Lee calls “orphaned Polaroids.” ...Who took these photos? Who do they depict? ...In Lee’s case, the story of his orphaned Polaroids took a surprising turn. When he uploaded some of them to Facebook, the social network’s facial-recognition technology immediately began to match them with real people.
...A few years ago, I bought a cache of photographs from a thrift store in Brooklyn, 35 or so pictures that I selected out of a pile of hundreds. ...Twenty-two of the pictures I bought that day featured the same woman at different stages in her life. She was sometimes alone and sometimes with family. But there she was, in picture after picture, from as far back as the late 1930s until at least 1980. ...I had the sense that my possession of these pictures was not their ideal posterity. They should be in the keeping of people who knew this woman, who cared about her.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
article (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/magazine/the-digital-afterlife-of-lost-family-photos.html?ref=todayspaper)