Photos Taken On A Weekend

 

Back in 2019, I wrote a blog post titled Suburbs Exist For the Weekend. During the week, suburbs can be veritable ghost towns, but on the weekends they spring to life when people can be disabused of the daily grind. In that post, I used a photo taken by Robert Adams in 1970 taken during his trip through Colorado and other Western states. That photo of suburban tract homes probably wasn’t taken on a weekend but is emblematic of the bleakness of American suburbia, a generation after the postwar suburban boom circa 1950.

The suburban routines of lawn mowing, barbecues, and so on, are the corollary of going out with a camera and taking snapshots and home movies as a part of that routine. Before smartphone cameras, photography probably was another exclusive weekend activity, and the photos perhaps had a visual vibe of having been taken on a weekend–or couldn’t have been taken during the week: Adults splashing in a backyard pool is decidedly a weekend activity. It wouldn’t be a Monday or a Tuesday unless it was a vacation.

This book would be a collection of photos proven to have been taken on a weekend, based upon testimonials of the photographers or their heirs or collectors, as well as “date taken” metadata for smartphone photographs. I have already started a blog of my own photos taken on a Saturday or Sunday, but the book may not contain my own photos. That would be my first choice, but alternatively, the book could also be a collective effort of people submitting photos for the book, or one or two co-authors.

An example of a photo taken on a weekend is Ansel Adams’ Moonrise Hernandez which was apparently taken on Sunday, November 1, 1941, although might have been taken on Halloween. Knowing that it was a Saturday or a Sunday (or Halloween on a Saturday) adds another dimension to the photo.

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