Alvin
Bettinger, Jr
Remnants of the Past
All that remains of my grandfather’s work—a lifetime of photographs—is inside a large book of contact sheets—images that are only about an inch wide each. The images, taken between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, show family and friends, coworkers, and complete strangers, mostly in Chicago, Ill., and Madison, Wisc.
I only met my grandfather once that I can remember, when I was ten years old. He was moving from London back to live in Arizona and stopped to sleep on my parents couch for a few weeks. My memories of that time are silent and flickering, like an old film, but filled with smell and vibrant color—spicy sausages he cooked on the stove; red, blue, and green robots on the television screen; and early morning sunshine filtering through the green leaves of my mother’s plant. Early in the morning, before anyone else in the house was awake, my grandfather and I would sit on the couch in the living room and silently watch cartoons together. It was the same couch I was sitting on, years later, when I found out he had died. I remember laughing nervously as I told my best friend; he was the first dead person I knew.
A year or so after my grandfather died, my mother received boxes and suitcases full of my grandfather’s belongings. Inside one of the boxes she found the book of contact sheets. All of the negatives had been lost, damaged in a flood in my aunt’s basement and then thrown away in the trash. Now all that remains is this small chunk of time, hazy reflections of lost and forgotten moments. Now, decades later, I obsess over the images, hoping to discover something about a man I never knew—a man described to me with cautious words and diplomatic phrases. I see all of this in his photographs, in the haunting gaze of people long gone. But mostly I see the remnants of a man who wanted to be something more. So I turn my camera to this book and photograph these remnants left by my grandfather of a world that no longer exists.
