The guy behind the site provides commentary for many of the pictures in varying degrees of lucidity, from maudlin homebrewed poems in terrible rhyme to flippant, almost insulting, hypothetical character descriptions:
I think the woman sitting to Olive's right is her sister, Ethel. She's the dominant one who gets first crack at the food on the dinner table. The girl on the left looks a little like Haley Mills but you probably don't remember who Haley Mills was. All the girls in my high school class looked like Olive and Ethyl. They all found husbands anyway... This is Ethyl's little boy "Jimmy." Today he's an eight-track cartridge repairman. I think that's a camper behind him or else it's a tractor trailer and Jimmy's playing next to the highway.When lucid, though, the fellow does make a few good points about the nature of film photography, most notably the fact that when you had but a small, finite number of exposures on a roll of film, you chose your shots carefully. Shots were set up with the utmost care, people were posed just right, and held still for the shot. Often times a second shot was taken "to make sure it comes out." The shoot-all-you-want-and-let-God-sort-the-d
My absolute favorite set is a sequence from WWII. An entire roll of film developed from an Argus-a camera and presented in the order in which the pictures were taken. It's sequential art, is what it is; the pictures tell the homecoming story. You start on the ship, travel through to New York Harbor, and end up back home with relatives, the cat, and the girl he left behind. It's amazingly beautiful and thankfully bereft of any extraneous commentary. So wonderful.
