top of page

Writer's pictureMorgan Fagg

Born in 1929

Updated: Apr 2, 2019

My antique camera, Anne Frank and Reverend King

What has developed since then?

What has survived of that time?

Anne Frank ran out of time and never fully developed

her black and white photos never became 60’s Polaroids or Instagram selfies.

Anne Frank, Jacky O and Martin Luther King,

born in 1929, a head of their time, in writing, style and thinking.

Criticised, attacked, shot at, murdered but remembered for all time.


All gone now but my camera survives,

built in Berlin in 1929 when Europe lost its mind

The Olympic Games televised

Jesse Owens and the Race of his life

Trials and rallies in Nuremberg

Before the collapse of Communism and fall of the Berlin Wall,

which was not even built in 1929,

Checkpoint Charlie and the Cold War

The Berlin Airlift and bankers committing suicide on Wall Street.


Dressed in Channel pink and shot at from an open window,

how many history books has that book depository seen?

As the shocking events of that day in Dallas echoed in history.

Martin Luther marched forward and was one in a million,

Anne Frank unbelievably was one in six million.

Her diary notes, pages that make us choke.

What has developed in print and film?

Audrey Hepburn had breakfast at Tiffanys

and Grace Kelly became a princess

what stories and history has developed

since my camera’s development in 1929’s Berlin?

The stock market crashed

Black and White clashed

Death and destruction

Code breaking computers

Holocaust and Civil Rights

and Rockets to the moon

Dear diary, “I had a dream”

where everyone asks,

“not what the country can do for” them

but takes “one small step for mankind”

Four score and ten, my camera has seen it all

90 years of recorded black and white history.

VENICE BEACH: How do things in 1929 measure up to today?

5 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page