Robert Thomas & Ruby Dial

Love these old pictures.

Oh my dad used to do that when we were little. Have us stand with the sun shinning in our faces and then say SMILE!!!! *cringe*

Obviously So in love look at their hold on each other ...hope they lived a happy long life...

There was some special love stories came from the war and they had some special children!

I think the sun was in their eyes, but that doesn't explain their mouths. :)

I was born in early 1942 and will turn 77 very soon. It saddens me that almost ALL of those wonderful "Greatest Generation" Americans have gone to Heaven. Americans now are a weak, pale shadow of what they were - strong, hard working, decent folk. We are producing NOTHING like them now, and we are paying a heavy price for it!

You have highlighted part of what I like about your project.

Photography is a wonderful art, a wonderful tool. But even a perfectly honest, undoctored photo has to be interpreted with care. Because photographs seem so realistic, look so much like the real world, we can easily forget that a photo shows us the real world only as it looked from one angle, at one tiny moment, usually a small fraction of a second. To understand a photo, we need its context—not only its spatial and cultural and historical context, but also its temporal context, the moments just before and after that tiny fraction of a second when the shutter opened and closed.

For example, we may see someone in a photo and think he must have been shouting, or weeping—but maybe the truth is that the camera caught him right in the middle of a sneeze.

I once saw online a news photo of a young defendant sitting with his lawyers in court. The picture was taken from somewhere behind the defense table, at which he and his lawyers were sitting. In the photo, his arm is draped over the back of the chair, and he's looking behind himself, away from the judge's bench. Someone posted a comment on the photo, describing the young man as scum, and citing as proof the facts that his arm was so casually thrown over the chair and that he wasn't even looking at the judge. But that photo is one fraction of one second from his trial. For all we know, the court was in recess and the judge wasn't even in the room. Maybe the defendant's arm was on the back of the chair to help him turn around to look behind himself; maybe he was looking in that direction because there'd just been a loud noise behind him, or someone behind him was talking to him. Maybe the news outlet chose to publish this particular photo simply because it was the only one taken in the rare instance in which a photographer *behind* the defendant could get a picture of the *front* of his face. With a video, instead of a still photo, we'd have more context on which to base our visual interpretation (and the moral judgment we're sometimes so eager to pass on others).

And that's part of why I value your project: it is your effort to find out and share with the rest of us the interesting context around old photos. :)