A Kodachrome transparency is a murky plastic square inside a white frame. Pick one up and you might be able to make out a smiling face, a tree, the outline of a roof. Slide one into a projector and the technicolor world it contains will burst onto the wall, the colors that inspired Paul Simon to sing, “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”
Inside EBM Vintage on Chapel Street, walk past antique bookshelves and star-shaped lanterns and you’ll find a bin full of hundreds of Kodachrome transparencies. They’re designed to be projected and magnified on a screen, but EBM Vintage makes do with a suitcase-sized lightbox, laid flat on a table. The bin is deep enough for several hours of voyeurism. You can peer at countless moments captured before Kodachrome discontinued production of these slides in 2010. If you have a dollar in your pocket, you can also buy one: your very own freeze frame of somebody’s Tuesday 30 years ago.
The first photo I see, already laid on the lightbox, features four elderly women eating brunch, dressed in polka dots and gaudy jewels, grinning widely. Just above it is a photo of a disgruntled toddler sagging under the weight of the baseball bat on his shoulder. On the frame, someone has scribbled “Jonny.” Two slides to the left is a man kneeling next to a gravestone, staring at the camera. That one seems private. I tuck it back into the bin.
Another slide shows a family of brunettes standing around a small old woman, probably the family matriarch, a great-grandmother. The young man standing right behind her, holding her wheelchair, rocks one of those mustache-haircut combos that you mostly see in documentaries about Vietnam War protests and ’70s counterculture.
The family looks like mine. Their hair is a little straighter, their men a little taller, but I know I’ve posed for a similar photo standing next to my grandmother’s wheelchair. I have the photo somewhere on my phone, and I think about how I haven’t looked at it since the day we took it. I guess it’s nice to know it’s there if I want to remember what she looked like, and I wouldn’t need a fancy lighting setup to relive that moment.
I push my hand into the bin and watch the synthetic photo tiles consume it. I wonder why there are hundreds of transparencies here. I wonder what could drive someone to bring a box of these to an eclectic store on Chapel Street. I wonder if someone found them while cleaning out their attic—little black squares with wisps of shape and color—and didn’t bother to hold them up to a light.
The family photo keeps catching my eye. Earlier that day I had found a dollar in my back pocket, brittle from being washed and dried. I decide to become the next person in the life cycle of this photo to own it and to look at it if I ever feel like it. Maybe I’ll hold it up to my desk lamp as soon as I get home. Or maybe it’ll live in the bottom of a drawer until I donate it to a vintage store in sixty years.
I set my dollar on the counter next to the cash register and place a square inch of someone else’s life in my pocket.
— Dani Klein
Photos by Dani Klein
