Editor’s note: This essay sits in the Studio as a reflection on context, memory, and meaning-making. In organisations and in life, we rarely encounter complete stories — we inherit fragments, artefacts, and signals. How we interpret those fragments shapes culture, identity, and decision-making.

These photographs, taken decades ago, become a small case study in sensemaking: what is seen, what is missing, and how humans fill the gaps with narrative. In Cultivated terms, this is a meditation on how meaning is constructed — quietly, personally, and often without instruction.

Lacking Context

Among some of my dad’s photos were a handful taken by my grandparents.
They stopped me in my tracks.

Mid-century America
— cars with long fins, theatres glowing at night, men in blazers crossing wide streets.

The colours were strange, the negatives imperfect, the frames slightly blurred. Something in the film or the processing had gone wrong.

And that was the point.