« on family, photography and time capsules »
Over the weekend, Marcus, Alex and I went over to my parents' house. My dad's younger brother, Uncle Larry, and his wife of 38 years, Auntie Beth, were in town visiting.
As it happens, right before we left our house to go over there, I was looking for a pair of shoes deep in my closet (related: you don't even want to see the state of my closet), and there, at the back, I found an ancient photo album. I have no idea how I came to be in possession of this album, but there it was: old, falling apart (the front cover was hanging on by a thread), and full of old, yellowed black and white photos and letters: most of the images were of my dad and his friends from back in the early 60's when he was at university in Birmingham, England; but there were a few from the same time period of my mother and her friends, when she was at university in Bristol, England. There were notations on the back: "My 'digs' in Birmingham" or "The first time I ever saw snow" or "My 21st birthday."
It was like coming across my own personal time capsule. And it was pretty incredible.
Needless to say, I packed it up to take to my parents' -- I knew it would make for great conversation, especially since Uncle Larry happens to be as avid a photographer as I am (unfortunately, he doesn't put his photographs online, or I would link you; but trust me, what that man does with a landscape and a polarizing filter on his lens is not to be believed). I was right -- for a good 45 minutes, we pored over the photographs, with my mom and dad telling us the stories behind the photos. So great.
Afterwards, Uncle Larry and I started talking photography, and I mentioned to him that I rarely, if ever, actually print my photos. "Oh, you need to," he said emphatically. "In fact, I print all of my favourite photographs and put them in albums. I don't even really organize them by theme, I just label the albums 'Photos 1,' 'Photos 2,' and so on. I just make sure they're printed."
He's so right, of course. I think most of us who sort of live in the online world have this false sense of security that as long as we archive our images properly on hard drives and back-up hard drives, we're golden -- forgetting of course, that the mediums change and become obsolete faster than we take notice (case in point: when was the last time you retrieved a file off of a floppy disk?). I need to do a better job of printing my images and putting them in albums -- not scrapbooks, you understand, because I really don't have much interest in starting that as a hobby (although, admittedly, the works of my friend Ali Edwards are certainly inspiring) -- but more just simple albums. Just books filled with photographs, inserted with those adhesive photo corners, with perhaps the odd inscription or two on the back.
I left that old photo album at my parents' that day, but came away with a new resolve. Because it would be really cool if one day, grown-up Alex comes over to Marcus and my house with her family, asking me for the stories behind the images in one of my old albums.
Images: Photographed in my parents' kitchen on September 5, 2010, with my Nikon D300, 50mm 1.4 lens.
Song: Come as you are, as performed by Laura Love
Mon, September 6, 2010
Reader Comments (23)
You are so right. I stopped printing my photos ages ago because I was amassing quite a haul. If I had kept it up we'd be buried in prints by now. Instead I'm just buried in stacks of film. But a few now and again would be nice. And I so appreciate the few I framed and hung next to my desk.
Thanks for the reminder.
So true - I was just thinking the other day, that I haven't got anything in my photo albums for about the past 10 years!
A few years ago I inherited some photos (and slides!) when my step-grandmother passed away. Photos that are 40 - 80 years old of people I don't know, yet they're family. I posted a few on my girl Sunday website on the weekend.
Lovely post, and so timely, thank you.
x
having grown up as part of a young generation of people who are practically eating computers for breakfast and breathing the internet, I am so completely accustomed to the digital age that the thought of PRINTING my works never even occurred.
but then, I think of my grandmother's fastidious scrapbook-making (she has heavy, thick volumes stretching back to a time when she and my grandfather were just married), and I realize how much I would love to hold my memories in my hands, on paper and in frames and in books, as opposed to just on a screen, ten or twenty years from now. how funny that this is an innovative thought for me!
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. My daughter is six, and we have probably printed only 20 or 30 photos of her since she was born. I too treasure my family's albums, and want her to have something to look at and treasure down the road. Thanks for the reminder...
I worry about this sometimes. The digital age we live in may turn out to be one of the most currently documented, and the least historically documented, of all time. CDs, DVDs and disks, floppy and otherwise, don't last as long as most people think.
Hello Karen,
Just today I read this article:
http://www.sarahwilson.com.au/2010/09/i-used-to-write-letters-plus-a-new-arcade-fire-experiment/
It's about connecting music and your childhood and your childhood home - I thought it might
be interesting to you.
Take care,
Lex
Well you know I agree with this! :) It's so important to print photos out. Even as a scrapbooker, apart from making scrapbook pages I also plan to print photos out for a regular album. Stacy Julian, another inspiring scrapbooker has been advocating this for years.
I also have a few photos of my parents back in the day with their friends on Sunday limes at the beach. Great stuff.
i used to keep all my photos on a back up external hard drive, and copy them on a disk. ONe day teh external drive died, and the disc whole load of pictures that I loved turned out to be faulty. I just lost the lot. it was really painful.
i'm trying to find one of those external online companies that back you up. I think it's the safest things.
I used to have albums, but I travel a lot, so it's too heavy really. for a while I had a wall where I put all the photos I liked, and once they graduated from there would go in an album, with a reference, but the album itself had no order. I think I will try to go back to that. it really is very different to have them on print, but when you take so many, it seems hard to keep up...
I guess you and Meredith Winn are on the same wavelength because her post on Shutter Sisters this morning is very similar. I should do better about printing off my pictures, but I don't think I have it in me to go full-blown into scrapbooking. Maybe my solution is to have online albums printed into small books...
I was just thinking about this because I actually did print most of my photos and put them in lovely, plain black leather photo albums UNTIL a year ago when I got my digital camera. Now, I don't print them because I take SO MANY photos. We came back from a wonderful vacation with 300 photos (four children - lots of photo ops), nearly all of which I loved. So, how do you know which ones to print? One of my leather albums holds a max of 300. In any case, you've just hardened my resolve to get back to printing. Now, if I could only self edit...