The Man in the Picture
I don’t know the man staring back at me. The same blood runs through our veins. The same long skinny arms and terrible eyesight. The same ancestors. Yet the man staring back at me has never known my voice, and I have never known his laughter. The man is a lot taller than I will ever be; in fact, the camera taking his picture is tilted up so he fits in the frame. His hair is hidden under a sharply cut hat, he wears a suit and a tie, what seems to be his daily uniform. Who is this man? I wonder.
I sit surrounded by his picture and many more in my aunt's house, a home that’s has been passed down through my family. I felt a sort of guilt not knowing the man staring back at me, his picture had always been there on the shelf right across my designated seat at the dinner table, watching my life unfold, but I never thought to ask. Suddenly, faces began flooding the room as I noticed more and more strangers sitting on fireplaces and windowsills that had been staring at me the entire time. They were always watching my life unfold while theirs remained frozen in time. I wanted to know them, their stories, their personalities.
So I decided I would. I began a project to find out who one of those faces was, a face that I would end up identifying as my great grandfather. I had never met my grandfather nor his father, so I had to scrape the memories of the last generation that knew him, sifting through fragmented memories to put his story together. What I found out changed me forever.
His name was José Gotor Palacios. He was born in 1895 and lived a life full of passion, love, heartbreak, and entrepreneurship. He dreamed of capturing the world so that his time and his people would never be forgotten. His passion was film and photography and through the use of his Leica cameras, which were rare to see, he captured life in his hometown in rural Spain. More specifically, in Canfranc– a small but important town due to its strategic location in the Pyrenees and its train station connecting trade between Spain and France. His passion spread throughout the town as he spent his time creating films depicting skiers on the mountains, the dreamt up stories the townspeople created, and so much more to play in the local cinema. A theatre which he himself built from the ground up to foster a society revolving around film and innovation in a town where old traditions still reigned. The cinema wasn’t his only business. He also started a company within the famous Canfranc station, where he worked to support his family of seven children and a wife.
He was a man full of successes but he fought for the life he lived. His first wife passed away along with two of his kids at a young age. His life took a quick turn of events as the town would burn down completely and a Civil War would erupt, forcing him to move and lose the life he had built. He ended up in a new city, Zaragoza, where his children and their children would grow. During a war devastating the country, killing thousands, he created a new life for his family, protecting them as he could. He left the town with nothing but a few films and his family.
Nonetheless, he was never forgotten and neither was his work. Little would he know that his movies would have later been put into national museums, kept as the last depictions of a town and the people that existed there. He never wanted his people to be forgotten, and they never were. His films and pictures were stories frozen in time, capturing the stories of people, places, and generations which are easily lost by fading memories. These pictures now lay in a house, my aunts house, a standing memory of history.
A standing history which I dug through to find some of my grandfather's films, the ones that he managed to keep. Now as I watch the films, for the first time I see my great grandfather. It's a flickering video colored in black and a light yellow where a man smiles and holds his whole family walking by a town now gone. His smile, his walk, I finally see him. The film then jumps to showing skiers coming out of a minivan with wooden accessories and hairstyles long out of style. I can’t take my eyes off the film. It's something I never had the chance of living but somehow I could feel the warmth radiating from the man in the films.
I hadn’t realized his impact until I saw it with my own eyes; the immortality of film.
My great grandfather’s stories are frozen in time, but that isn’t the only thing that remains immortal. His legacy, his story, and those people captured in his film live on in me. As long as there is a memory, a story, a legacy no one will remain forgotten. And so, just like my great grandfather, the instinct to reach for a camera and capture my own experiences and legacy is instilled in me.
And so, I finally learned the story of the man staring back at me. A stranger had been my inspiration, I never knew he was there. I just had to find him. Who is this man? Someone I am proud to call my family.