In this photograph a lady is engaging in an activity common at the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C.: She is making a rubbing of a name on the wall. She is of an age suggesting that the name she is preserving is a contemporary, a brother or a husband, rather than a son or a father (I use masculine genders because there are eight women on the wall and none appear on this part of the wall).
She has come to make a rubbing, to preserve a name on paper as a remembrance of a person important to her in some way. A person who gave their life in Vietnam. The photograph records the instant of the act, but cannot tell us the story of her life, or his. Was it a brother, enlisted or drafted and sent off to war? Dead in 1968. Age? Too young likely. Or was it a husband? Married just after high school or college, drafted or ROTC, sent to Vietnam. Dead for fifty years now. Still remembered.
In the black and white photo, the lady is light and without much detail. Her reflection in the stone of the memorial is darker and seems more substantial that the real lady that kneels before it. It is as if her life in the stone was as real or even more real that her life in the light. How much of her life was lost? How much has she lived inside the stone?
This photograph was selected for the Texas Photographic Society Members Only Show at the Artworks gallery, 1214 Sixth Street, Austin, Texas. The show ran through October 13, 2018.
Links: The Texas Photographic Society, The Members Only Show, and Members Only Show Gallery.
Dawson Place is an alley just off Mason street on the north side of Nob Hill in San Francisco. It hides in the shadow of the magnificent Fairmont Hotel, which sits astride the top of the hill, just up Mason.
