The sun is breaking over the back field, and I’m glad to be alive. The last two weeks—oof. A pretty gnarly strain of COVID treated my body like a Chick-fil-A playground. I’ve mostly kicked it, but the brain drain is real.
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1. The Bleakest Story
Follow me into the bleakest story: The day came when the ground shook, the sky ashed over, and the long winter set in. On the eve of that winter—the last normal night—a woman stood on a hill, raised her camera, and took the world’s lastphotograph. Of what?
A portrait of her best friend wearing her wedding dress.
The last pink flower glowing in the valley.
The sunset. A rainbow.
Her daughter running through grass with a long string attached to a red dragon kite.
Maybe this thought exercise is too dark around the edges, but the day will come when someone—Russian or Ukrainian, Chinese or Taiwanese, Israeli or Palestinian, Conservative or Progressive—will take the world’s last photograph. And if not the world’s last photograph, the culture’s last photograph. And if not the culture’s last photograph, their last photograph. When that final frame is developed, when it’s printed, how many histories will it hold? How far will the historians go to archive it, preserve it, and protect it?
2. The Rolleiflex, the War, and the Immigration of a Camera
In the early twentieth century, Braunschweig was a thriving city, built on a history of independence, innovation, industrialization, and commerce. By 1933, though, the Nazis had done what Nazis do. The city had become one of Hitler’s crowned jewels. The Nazi war machine had built an aeronautical engineering facility in the city in service of the coming conflict. A Hitler Youth Academy for Youth Leadership had sprung up, and there, Nazis trained the brightest minds of a generation to not only swallow the ideology of a madman but to advocate for it. A sister school for SS officer candidates operated in the town.
But Braunschweig wasn’t just a Nazi outpost. Before the madmen wrought their apocalypse, the city was home to captains of German industry. Among those men were Paul Franke and Reinhold Heidecke. Their company, Rollei, was one of the finest camera manufacturers of the day.
By 1937, Rollei had created the Rolleiflex Automat, which won the Grand Prix award at that year's Paris World Fair. Business boomed. The company exported cameras around the world, but sometime between 1939 and 1940, everything changed. Hitler had impregnated Europe with war. In these days of advancing darkness, the Nazis banned Rollei from collecting money from “enemy states,” which constituted nearly every Western European country. Sales waned. Exports of the world’s finest camera ceased. Rollei was on the verge of collapse.
Sometime in 1940, a Rolleiflex Automat bearing serial number 856173 rolled off the factory line. With no international market and no functional ability to make its way beyond German borders, this little box with the Zeiss lens was likely held captive within the confines of Germany. What were its first frames?
Jack-booted thugs smoking cigarettes with rifles over their shoulders?
A portrait of the photographer’s wife in a wedding dress?
Jewish prisoners of the subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp?
The last pink flower. A sunset. A rainbow?
The allied fire-bombing of Braunschweig that left the town burning for days?
His daughter running through the grass with a long string attached to a red dragon kite?
Who knows what joys or atrocities this camera captured? I wonder: Did its original owner think he was capturing the first frames of the apocalypse, the last frames of mankind?
3. The Ozark Rolleiflex, 2024
How does a World War II production-era camera find its way to the Ozarks? Perhaps it crawls out of some ditch with some war-time photographer. Maybe that photographer exchanges it for a one-way ticket to anywhere but Braunschweig. Maybe the camera serves as a bartering item for the following decade.
Maybe the camera sits in some home untouched by the firebombing of Braunschweig. Maybe it’s sold to some British reconstruction worker for bread and milk money.
Maybe it’s put back into circulation by Rollei—which somehow survived the Nazi apocalypse—after the war. It is exported to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or wherever.
I’ll never know the full history of this camera, but in the winter of 2024, my friend, Matt Brock, who resells items on eBay for a living, sent me this exact camera. As I’ve used it over the last few months, as I think about its history, I can’t help but wonder: If I were poised on the edge of a coming apocalypse, if the film in this camera was the last roll on earth, what would I want to capture?
4. The Rolleiflex, , and Orthodox Farmhouse Brewery
At Orthodox Farmhouse Brewery, a loose group of friends gathers almost weekly. Sometimes the gathering is planned. Other times, it’s organic. Always the company is good.
These are the people of my community, my Ozarks, my America. They comprise neither Pollyanna nor pearl clutchers. Some have religion, others do not. Some claim more conservative or libertarian politics, while others are more progressive. We all know our country is breathing flatulent-filled air, and most blame someone else for the odor. We don’t talk about it much because polite company doesn’t discuss public flatulence, but a gas fills the volume of its container, and we’re all in the container. There’s no escaping the gas.
Matt sits at one end of the picnic table, nursing a beer. His wife, Brett, sits beside him. Matt talks about his horses like a mother might talk about her children. They are more than animals; they are family, and there are days I think he’d rather be with them than any other human.
A few months back, on Matt’s fortieth birthday, I asked what he wanted from his next decade of living. “I want to stand on the edge of some field in Montana, whistle, and have a horse come right up to me and eat out of my hand,” he said. I laughed and said that was an ambitious dream, and that he should settle for watching the wild horses run. Wouldn’t that be beautiful enough? He wants more than beautiful enough. This is his magic.
At that picnic table, I ask Brett about her new publication—the Northwest Arkansas Local Food Guide. She wants to change the region’s relationship with food, she says. She hopes we’ll begin supporting the local farmers who work multiple jobs to keep the family farm afloat. This, I tell her, is more ambitious than Matt’s horseman dreams. I hope she never settles, though.
Luke—an engineer by day and farmer at all other times—holds his daughter under the windmill. It’s been a day, and she is done, he says. She fights sleep, wrestles dusk, says she’s not tired. He claims he’s not tired either, but that’s a lie. I remember being a father to feral ferrets… I mean toddlers. Luke nearly nods off as I turn the lens in his direction.
Taylor has forgotten more about film photography than I’ll ever know. He takes the Rolleiflex, looks through the top viewfinder, and fiddles with the dials. He’s an old Minolta man, 35mm, and I’ve seen some of his photographs. It’s the stuff of envy.
His wife, Ellen Gray, is a farmer, and she’s begun selling produce at two local farmer’s markets. She needs more land, she says, and I hope she finds it. I pray bumper crops upon her, but only in my head. She deserves all that’s good.
It’s unlikely we’re on the edge of the apocalypse. It’s improbable that these will be the world’s last photographs or even the last photographs of Ozark culture. But could they be?
Photographs are the summation of many things. Photographer. Equipment. Subject matter. And so, if these were the last photos of an era, what would they say?
They’d tell the story of a photographer who loved his Ozarks, its people with their pint glasses, its windmills. They’d say this photographer loved unadorned, everyday beauty, particularly the everyday beauty of horsemen, farmers, and local food advocates. (They’d say he needed to increase his exposure by at least a stop, too.)
These photos would tell another story, too, the story of a camera. They’d tell of long-dead engineers who built things meant to last more than a lifetime. They’d tell the story of how even the most advanced countries of any age can lose their way, and hopefully, how those same countries can find their way again. They’d share that even the darkest periods of human history can produce extraordinary feats of engineering and art.
Each frame would tell of people who cared about the real stuff of earth, the good gifts of God. And even if you didn’t know the people in those photos, wouldn’t you somehow sense this truth? Wouldn’t those photos whisper, “There are places where friends gathered without distraction. Do you remember those days?” Wouldn’t those frames stand in resistance to the politicians, talking heads, and digital bots who took over the long-lost world?
Once, there were people who were comfortable in their skin. Once there were people who sat in the sun. Once there were people who believed in creating a better world, even if that world sat on the edge of apocalypse. Do you remember them?
The Observationalist
In the spring of 2023, I began exploring the concept of visual language by creating a book of photos, poems, and short essays entitled The Observationalist. All proceeds are reinvested in the equipment I need to pursue more ideas like this. You can preview The Observationalist by following this link or clicking on the image below.
Thanks for reading!
One of the most imaginative and beautifully written pieces of have read lately. As I just lost my husband, I treasure the photographs of him, especially the last one, despite his ravaged body. Norma Rowland
Beautiful, Seth.