Shooting Film in a Digital Age

The Quarryville Library recently had a photo contest which reportedly received an unexpectedly low amount of entries. Due to timing issues I was unable to submit my Lancaster County related image, however, above is the image that I was going to enter. I shot this picture of a field about 3 miles south of Green Tree on 896 using a $40 camera with a plastic lens on film. To find out more about the Holga (the previously named camera), see the lomography site (http://microsites.lomography.com/holga/) and wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holga).

Quarryville

“The village of Quarryville is the most important and populous town in the county south of Strasburg. Situated mostly in Eden township, but partly in Drumore, and bordering on Providence, it marks the limit of the limestone lands southward in the county even more distinctly than the point at which, in the earlier settlement of the county, the German met the Scotch-Irish and Quaker elements of its citizenship. It is in the bowl-shaped valley in which this village lies, between “Stony Hill”, a western spur of the Mine Ridge, and a lower chestnut-covered ridge south of Quarryville, that the limestone is cut off.”

Thus begins the section appropriately entitled “Quarryville” in the History of Lancaster County (or, the entire title: History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men) written by Franklin Ellis and Samuel Evans and published in 1883. I had seen and read sections of this locally famous (well, maybe not too famous) history online in various locations and found it to be a fascinating glimpse into what the Solanco area looked like about 150 years ago. Interestingly, I happened to find an original copy of this selfsame tome about a year ago at a mid-county church that I had been working for. I flipped through the 127 year old pages with caution and speed trying to find any passage about localities with which I might be familiar; this is a historian’s gold mine I thought.

And indeed it is. A quick reading of the above passage will lend insight into the naming of a couple Quarryville roads. History, as I am finding more and more, is important for, among other reasons, giving us insight into who and why we are what we are. Maybe more on this at a different time, but for now, it will suffice to say that I will be digging into and sharing more from Ellis’ and Evans’ book in the future as I continue to explore the area.

I was able to make some images of sections of the book with my digital camera and have posted some below. While I think that digital cameras could be used to make really good images of text I did not have the ideal setup: hence the mediocre image (for reading at least).

Enjoy.

Grass

“The grass is always greener on the other side”--a common observation on the phenomenon of human desire well known by restless teenagers and cheating spouses. The former, seeing greener grass in every town or city except their own, give birth to an oft repeated dream as graduation approaches: to “get out of this place” when school is complete.

But what if the problem is not with the perceived but rather the perceiver? The question comes into sharp focus when I think about my own experiences in life: that new phone, book, camera, car, or experience, which I thought would quench an itching desire, quickly browns and I am once again looking across the fence to greener pastures.

This website is a chance to rethink and re-look at the small town of Quarryville; to try to perceive green where I once saw brown; to see beauty where routine and familiarity tends not to see anything; to see if reality can be found here in addition to “over there”. It will be a place where culture, history, philosophy, theology, and maybe a bit of criticism can interact engagingly and constructively. It will seek the vintage Quarryville to the tune of definition number 4 below:

vintage adj

1601

1 of wine: of, relating to, or produced in a particular vintage

2 : of old, recognized, and enduring interest, importance, or quality: classic

3 a : dating from the past: old

b : outmoded, old-fashioned

4 : of the best and most characteristic — used with a proper noun 〈vintage Shaw: a wise and winning comedy —Time〉

By no means, however, am I advocating a kind-of small town tribalism. I think that it is important to travel: to experience and learn about the wider world and its diversity. I myself have been blessed with the opportunity to travel broadly a couple times and am thankful for it. The claim that small towns generally exhibit a close-minded isolationism tends to be true, I think, precisely because many have been there their whole lives and have never interacted with someone who thinks or lives differently. And so I think it is important to travel, read and interact widely that we might achieve a mature understanding of the world. That doesn’t mean, however, that we need to dispose and disregard our own provenance and culture. A proper response is I think, the goal of this website: to engage and encourage the good where it may be found: where you are.