It's probably the closest I'll ever come to fulfilling an impossible dream.
I think I've written in here before about a fanciful dream I have that was actually inspired by a real dream, a dream from a couple of years ago where I was walking through downtown Marquette with a camera. That's something I actually do quite a bit in real life, but in that dream I was walking through the downtown Marquette of the 1930s with my 21 megapixel Nikon DSLR, taking pictures (and hi-def video) of a Marquette long-gone, of buildings no longer there and businesses consigned to history.
It was an amazing dream. Sadly, I know a little bit too much about physics (and the impossibility of time travel) to know that it's a dream that will never come true.
Or...so I thought.
When I was doing prep work for the season of “Pieces of the Past” that we just finished, I came across a treasure trove of photos of Marquette of 1929. They were taken by Robert S Platt, a sociologist working for the American Geographic Society. He was working on an article for the AGS's magazine, and spent a week in Marquette that summer just taking pictures. Now, aside from being a sociologist, Platt also had an amazing eye for photography, shooting some of the iconic pictures of Marquette of almost 100 years ago.
He shot many of the same things I shot in my dream, and that I would like to shoot if I could break every law of nature and head back in time.
I used a few of his pictures in various videos, and then saved the lion's share—some of his best work—for the final episode of the season. I also made them into the last segment of mine during “Legends & Lore III” at Kaufman last month, and I still have people coming up to me to talk about a particular shot of Platt's that has stuck with them.
So, while I know that I'll never ever be able to go back in time and take those pictures and videos, I'm thankful that someone at the time actually did.
And because of that, I will forever be in awe of Robert S. Platt.