The People You Get to Know

It’s odd the way you get to know people online.

A while back I found myself becoming interested in vintage photography – mostly early 20th century urban street scenes, though to be honest it’s all interesting to me. I’m a historian. Seeing how people lived, even just the tiny window that a photograph opens, is fascinating in its own right. Many of the photographs I’ve found while pursuing this interest are now in the PowerPoint slides that I show my history classes and while I don’t make too much of a fuss over them in class my impression is that the students enjoy seeing them as well.

One of the best places to find such things is on Instagram, which is full of people who love these old photographs, who seek them out and forward them along for the rest of us to enjoy. I’ve signed up for a bunch of these pages now and I’m always happy to see what they send along each day. It’s a nice break from the madness of the world.

I’ve never met any of the people behind these pages. They give you a window into their world with what they post and you feel you know them a bit in that strangely distanced way that one knows anyone on social media where you only see what people choose to show you, but many of them live in other countries and even those who might be close by are living their own lives. You do get to know them a little that way, however, and that has to count for something.

One of them in particular posted a link to her personal page at one point, so I figured why not and followed her there too. She’s an elegant young woman, rather cosmopolitan – she speaks at least three languages that I have seen – and she has a knack for finding interesting photographs. There’s a lot of overlap between the two pages she runs, but on her personal page she will sometimes let you into her life a bit more. Once she took us on a photographic tour of her hometown.

She lives in Ukraine.

Since the Russian invasion she has focused on bearing witness – on posting the things outside of her window, on reposting the things her friends and colleagues have posted, and on spreading the word of what is happening to her country and how people can help.

I do not know this person, not really, but I worry about her and I hope she is safe, and every so often I will reply to one of her stories to let her know that neither she nor her fellow Ukrainians are forgotten, that I and the vast majority of the world are doing what we can, even if all that means is reaching out to someone we only know through social media posts and offering support.

When all this is said and done, when Putin is gone, the invaders are removed, and Ukraine is calm again, I hope she can go back to posting her photographs. I think we’re both looking forward to that.