Pieces of Time

A little piece of time. If you think about it, every time you take a photograph you capture a little piece of time on film. (I do, of course, refer to traditional photographic media for the purposes of this discussion as well as any other discussion I am likely to have in the forseeable future.) Everything stands still in the image, more or less, depending on how big a slice of time you have caught. Looking at images, you can see things exactly as they were when the images were made, be it a hundred years ago or yesterday.
Finding a cache of images from the past is a bit like traveling back in time. Kaye Treese has been traveling in time back to the the early 1900s, courtesy of his collection of glass plate negatives.
In 1948, Treese's family bought a house in Altoona, Pennsylvania from the family of local pharmacist Charles Rhodes. Although his profession was pharmaceutical, Mr. Rhodes interests were varied and obviously included the serious pursuit of photography; because in the attic of that house were the results of that interest, hundreds of glass plate negatives.
Prior to his death in 1948, Charles Rhodes, using a 4x5 camera recorded life in a small, early 20th century Pennsylvania town. Self portraits, parades, political rallies, social gatherings, all were subjects for his photography. It is interesting to reflect that the passage of time has lent a certain exoticism to these once everyday scenes and will do the same to the images that we make today, causing our everyday scenes to look quaint and old-fashioned 100 years hence.