Baker's Dozen: Grandkids

(Charlie Dunton)

(Rob Spring)

(Jerker Andersson)

(Monika Göhmann)

(Marc Vayssières)

(Kent McColl Wiley)

(Jeremy Fagan)

(Paul Martini)

(John Gordon)

(Chris Kern)

(Michael Gay)

(Craig P. Beyers)

And for good measure....

(William Schneider)

Honorable mentions (the other finalists, from the group I used to build this final set): Roger Bartlett, Lara Arnold, Jim Arthur, Terry Burnes, Roger Bradbury, Eric Peterson, Nick Cutler, Patrick Murphy, Rodolfo Canet-Castelló, and Marty Knapp. If you don't see yours or find your name above, no need to despair, as I have several other sets planned.

Details:

1. Submitted by Charlie Dunton of Yorktown, Virginia, USA. "I took this photo of my granddaughter during a visit to a local Five Guys restaurant for lunch. I spent the entire time photographing her, ending up with over 200 images. This was one of the few times she gave any indication I was even there." There's much more to Charlie's story, and it's pretty sweet, but I'll save it for when I do individual posts about the pictures.
2. Submitted by Rob Spring of Barre, Vermont, USA. "Here is a photo of my grandson, Waylon, with his dad, my son-in-law. This was the last ride on the swing that my kids used more than 30 years ago. The swing was attached to a limb of an ancient but dying Vermont sugar maple which was cut down the next day after standing in what is now our front yard for over 155 years."
3. Submitted by Jerker Andersson of Lund, Sweden. "Early Fall, 2004. My father in law, Håkan, and his first grandchild Elsa have a conversation in the dining room. Over the years since then, my wife Åsa and I have had two more kids, a girl and a boy, and my wife’s father has five grandchildren in all. But this was in the beginning. Sometimes I find it hard to remember what life was like without the kids. Lots of time to spend, I suppose."
4. Submitted by Monika Göhmann of Darmstadt, Germany. "In the image you see my parents with my daughter. My mother hated to have her photograph taken, but my daughter convinced her to sit down with her on this day, because we didn’t have any photo of the three of them together. My parents were 95 (father) and 93 (mother) years old at the time. Only four months later, they had to leave their house to live in an old peoples home; in 2020 they both died. So this image is a true treasure for my family!"
5. Submitted by Marc Vayssières of Davis, California, USA. "When my wife was dying of cancer a visit by our granddaughter was the only thing that could still cheer her up. Completely oblivious of the tubes and other medical devices Aveline would climb in the bed and cuddle with her Nana for a little book reading."
6. Submitted by Kent McColl Wiley of Earlysville, Virginia, USA. "A photo circa 1900 that contains many relatives on my mother's side of the family, by the Wadd Brothers. My grandmother, Jessie McColl Sclater, is the young girl with a lace collar on the front left. She is in front of her grandfather, John Cunningham MaClure, of the Royal Engineers who established the white settlement of Abbotsford, BC. His wife, my grandmother's grandmother, Martha MacEntyre MaClure, is to his left, and to her left is my great grandmother Susan MaClure McColl. Photo courtesy of Vancouver Archives."
7. Submitted by Jeremy Fagan of Liverpool, UK. "My Dad died about five years ago, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. We drove down to see my Mum, and by the time we got there, there wasn’t anything practical to do, so we went to Rockingham Castle, and my daughters played with their Grandma. Memory is a funny thing—I could have sworn that I took this picture that day, but when I looked for this picture for the Baker’s Dozen, I see that it was actually at the same place about six weeks later when we’d gone down again to help sort out Dad’s books and CDs. My Mum had cared for Dad for nearly a decade, and this picture shows her now being able to give them all of her attention, on a beautiful Spring day. She’s just been with us for a week this summer, and the three of them are still this close."
8. Submitted by Paul Martini of Bluff, Utah, USA. "My granddaughter Blaire in an approximately 800–1,000-year-old Anasazi/ancestral Puebloan kiva."
9. Submitted by John Gordon of Kalamunda, Western Australia. "Tabitha and Angus, my grandchildren, fooling around on the front deck at a beach cottage we rented at a small Indian Ocean coastal town several hours north of Perth, Western Australia, in 2008. They were both natural models and I was fortunate to get this with my then new-to-me digital camera, a tiny Nikon P5100 point-and-shoot. I love the pose and the colours. Tabitha later was in high demand as a model for several years and Angus was head-hunted for the junior squad of a professional UK soccer team. Today, she is applying to do her PhD at one of Australia’s most prestigious Universities and Angus is enrolled in an environmental science degree. Tempus fugit!"
10. Submitted by Chris Kern of Rockville, Maryland, USA. "This photograph was made in the backyard of our family home in Leonia, New Jersey, sometime during the summer of 1951 by my father, Gene Kern (1914–2010). The subjects are his father, Robert (1886–1963), and my sister, Robin (b. 1949). It was shot with one of the best film cameras I've ever used, a prewar Zeiss Contax II with a collapsible 50mm Sonnar lens, which my grandfather purchased in New York from a German-Jewish refugee—reportedly for an exorbitant price because he wanted to help the fellow out without embarrassing him by appearing to offer charity—and which I inherited many years later as a teenager."
11. Submitted by Michael Gay of Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. "While visiting our local botanical garden, my 'wood nymph' granddaughter exclaimed, 'Hey, Granddaddy, check this out.' She picked the setting, struck the pose, then BAM, I took the shot."
12. Submitted by Craig P. Beyers of Ashburn, Virginia, USA. "A picture of my grandson, taken with my iPhone on a Disney cruise with my daughter and family. Benjamin was impatient as we waited for lunch on the ship and was unable to stay still. His father placed him on the window sill (Porthole sill? Porthole surround?) where he stood, sat, and finally—at my urging as I visualized this photo—lay down and stayed still for less than a minute. This was the best of the multiple photos I took. I like it because of his look, the lovely clouds in the background, and the way the porthole and surround acts like a leading line to bring your eye into the photo. While the clouds are the whitest and brightest part of the image, the slight glow on Benjamin’s face also draws your eye. His curved body laying on the porthole surround complements the surround and the porthole. I printed this and a picture of his sister as gifts for my daughter, which she’s framed and has in her house. I’ve done the same and have both pictures in our apartment."
13. Submitted by William Schneider of Athens, Ohio, USA. "Not having any children or grandchildren myself, I'm glad that you offered other options for entry. This is a photograph of me in 1950 with my maternal grandmother. Readily apparent from my father's photo, he and my grandmother had a wicked sense of humor when they got together. Their personalities still live for me in this photo. When he died, I inherited his collection of Kodachrome slides and the 35mm Kodak Retina camera that he used. I spent about half a year working part-time to clean away mold and digitize the slides. It was a lot of work, but there are so many treasured memories in the pictures."

Thanks to everyone who participated! This was a lot of fun.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

James: "I am guessing that anyone with grandchildren would pick the same number 1. Well done Charlie Dunton! And one out of two hundred is not a bad keeper rate.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Oops. With all the care I took in editing and formatting this, I still kinda messed up. Originally I had numbered the pictures 1 through 13 just as a key to connect them with the corresponding verbal matter below. But then I got the idea of putting a thumbnail next to the writeups, which obviated the need for the numbers. Then a few comments and emails made me realize that it was too easy to associate the numbers under the pictures with a ranking, i.e., best to worst. That's not what I intended. They're in a visual order I thought was effective, but it's not a ranking. So now I've put the name of the person who sent the picture in parentheses below each picture...but it's too complicated to remove the numbers from the formatting below (in the TypePad compositor, once you start a number series it becomes automatic), so I've left those in. I'll learn to do this blogging thing someday.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I really enjoyed this process and then seeing the final images. I also find it fascinating and instructive that on first pass through the images, some seem quite 'regular.' Nice photos but not necessarily photos that might rise to the top. But in context, with the small anecdote that accompanies each image, it all comes together. It pushes me again to remember that doing more with fewer images is crucial. Thanks for this BD—looking forward to additional iterations of this set and the next BD."

Mike replies: This is one of the things I'll talk about when I write about some of the individual pictures.

Martin Doonan: "As an outside observer, number 5 really struck me the most—it is the one picture here that told the full story by itself without me needing the accompanying text."

Comments

[Wes Cosand]

I cannot remember any of your blog posts I enjoyed more. These are simply wonderful.

[Jim Arthur]

What a great BD. I like them all. Normally I’m a little indifferent to the accompanying text but in this case it really enhances the pictures.

[Eric Rose]

Great selection Mike! These things are always hard to do. If we had 5 people putting together their selections we would see five different sets. All good and all different.

Eric

[Yes, that's right. --Mike]

[Lothar Adler]

With all sincere respect for the people involved and in appreciation of the very beautiful, heartwarming pictures ..., but I find them very, very bourgeois, very ideal world, very idealizing ....
But in this accumulation, does it do justice to the "concept of grandchildren"?
Is this how the majority of people live?
I really do not want to be unfair and of course these images are to be seen in the context of the living conditions of the readers of TOP, which of course is perfectly fine.
But I would have liked that perhaps those readers who travel to other countries, cultures could have contributed complementary images to show the human dimension of the grandchildren experience beyond the well-to-do middle class.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

A very charming collection. Well done everyone!

[Randall Teasley]

Well, all I can say is that this BD is an absolute delight. Thanks for coming up with he topic and for the great job you did in editing the set. It's a joy to behold.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

What a great collection! There isn't a single photo in that set that I wouldn't be happy to have been involved with, and there are a couple that just take my breath away (exactly which ones—well, there's some variation over time, though a couple of them always do). And besides picking "bests" is a mug's game.

I expected some great photos, of course; would have been disappointed if this crew hadn't come through.

You wanna try a crazy high-risk experiment some year? Actually invite a second person to go through the same submissions and pick their own Baker's Dozen! Do it quietly so if they get brain-lock and can't finish nobody gets publicly embarrassed (not them, not you). (For openness you might want to mention that as a possibility before people submit photos; they might care that somebody other than you would be expressing an opinion on them. I don't think it would stop anybody, but avoiding surprising people with that sort of thing is good.)

[Bahi]

This is a wonderful set of pictures. The last, though, is completely unexpected and great. Thanks to William Schneider for sending it and to you for choosing it. Superb.

[Cateto/Jose]

What an amazing, moving collection of pictures. Thanks to all of you who sent these wonderful shots.

In now in the mid 50s, have 4 kids (or rather, now adults) and pictures of both sons and grandfather are close to me for obvious reasons. It is true that, as some of you have written above, these pictures become real treasures with the years. Let's try to enjoy the times when we can still make these pictures of our loved ones, and also the memories of these times.