The old, Old World

Twenty-five years ago, Heather & I had the opportunity to visit Switzerland. We made the most of it.

While there, I pushed a hundred and twenty sheets of 4x5 transparency film through the Linhof and dozens of rolls of 35mm as well, always keeping the Nikon handy.

This week, just a month or so short of a full quarter century later, I finally finished working my way through all the scans I made from that film.

Seems a shame to just let the whole of it slumber on in the dark because it's 'off topic' here. What does that mean these days anyway, in our defiantly discursive new world?

Besides, it's about respecting the work. We're taught we must. So here we are.

Born to the mid 20^th Century, the thing that struck me most about the Old World is that it's really, really old. Seems obvious I know, but we're talking Roman walls.

As in built by actual Romans. That's what some call call 'Biblical times'.

I mean even in 'modern' times, 1677 was smack dab in the middle of King Philip's War on the dispensable folk who were here first and four years prior to William Penn receiving from the King a charter for to create Pennsylvania in his name.

In Chur they built hotels that hosted Kings. And eventually, us.

Saying the United States of America and everything that's gone on to mean wasn't even a gleam in the Enlightenment's eye is rank understatement.

As a true blue separation of church and state kinda guy, I recall being struck that religious iconography was routine on the everyday public square. Previously, I'd seen stuff like this only in werewolf movies and the like.

Today it wouldn't surprise me in Texas.

In any event, this still strikes me as quite the ways to go, just to go to church…

A week after returning home, I got my eyes on the giant pile of finished film. That's when I first felt with justified conviction, I can do this.

Now I'm reminded that despite those peers who scoffed, it really was possible to shoot 4x5 trans in the field at a success rate of better than 2:1, because I absolutely did.

So take that, incredulous swine of my personally distant past…

And hard as it is now to believe, 35mm film was once a pro medium.

Hell, National Geographic made its nut from that stuff for decades on end.

It was only after I learned how much film those guys (they were mostly guys) burnt through to earn a single placement in the magazine that I understood why some pro shooters I knew refused to believe me. Seemed axiomatic to them that I couldn't, I'm sure.

Little did they know how hungry the future is and was, even then.

Waste not want not, right?

Speaking of axioms, when the fastest route to the top of the world proves unpalatable…

…take the train.

I'd hope (but didn't really expect) that today, this view would be much the same:

No such luck. It isn't. I checked.

And to think I used to believe it was only cultures and their construct that collapsed.

In that same vein, it occurs to me that memorials built to our honored dead, no matter how noble the human sacrifice at the time, inevitably end up covered with shit.

All that said, for me the Old World had its charms.

I even got along famously with the natives.

But in the end, it was no place at all like home.

For instance, our tallgrass doesn't also make beer.

And Baroque art was friggin' insane. That is all.

For now.