This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
05/04/2017 12:01 AMOne of the biggest conundrums I face as I age, and my family gets older right along with me, is what to do with all the photos? Which ones do I display in frames, put in albums, store in boxes, throw away?
And now with technology making everything physical practically obsolete, which ones do I print or just leave on my iPhone or computer?
I have always printed out photos and put them in albums, labeled by date and event. I have stacks of these albums. The most recent are piled under the living room coffee table, the old ones are in cabinets, and the really old ones are in the basement. Framed photos are scattered in groupings throughout the house. I even have a wall of all black and whites.
It’s not that I’m so organized (have you seen the inside of my closets?). It’s just that I fear the past will disappear, that there will be no record that our lives, our children’s childhoods and adulthoods, and future children, and beloved pets ever existed, and that all our wonderful adventures ever happened.
Because if pictures never leave your electronic devices, will anyone ever look at them after you’re gone? Will families gather together to laugh and cry over memories passed around on a tiny phone screen? Or, not to get too existential, but will all that physical proof that we were really here dissolve into cyberspace?
A survey conducted by the PPA (Professional Photographers of America) just over a year ago found that 42 percent of people between 30 and 44 are no longer printing photos or creating photo albums. Of those surveyed, 67 percent stored their photos solely in digital form on a computer or phone. It is estimated that one out of 100,000 photographs taken today are ever printed.
“I think time will prove that we have gambled away our family histories—trusting too much in our ability to protect our memories on our phones, tablets, and other devices,” says David Trust, CEO of PPA.
I have evidence to support the relevance of my photo archiving. Whenever our sons come home, since they don’t live nearby, they crack open the albums to see what happened in our lives while they were away, to hopefully feel comforted by my keeping track of our times together—holidays, vacations, parties, landmark events, old friends and family reunited.
I hand my mother, who has dementia, the newest albums whenever she comes to visit and it gives her an anchor in time and space. She smiles, reassured that she still recognizes the people in the pictures. She also loves looking at the old photos, since her long-term memory is much better than her short-term. Looking at printed photographs is a truly therapeutic activity.
The last time our older son was home, he took photos on his phone of the pictures in my albums of him and his brother doing weird little kid antics; sporting hairstyles of the day like mullets, and dreads; posing with his high school friends—and then posted them on Instagram for all to see.
Nostalgia is not only for the old, it seems.
I love the old sepia-toned photos my mother has haphazardly stored in boxes in her apartment, going back as far as my great-great grandparents. They’re one of my only connections to our history as elder family members die along with their oral storytelling.
My father was a gifted amateur photographer. He captured small but exquisite moments, revealing on his subjects’ faces not only the joyful, times, but expressions of yearning, loss, and mystery. He took pictures from interesting, unexpected angles. His photos often captured the unspoken elephants in the room.
Fast-forward 50 years. Who posts photos where everyone doesn’t have a smile pasted on their faces and life isn’t grand? And babies and pets aren’t absolutely adorable? (OK, babies and pets are always absolutely adorable). Facebook albums are the 21st century version of a Norman Rockwell painting where people can create their own reality for the entire world to see, whether the entire world cares or not.
People of a certain age remember film. Dropping off the canister to be developed (remember Fotomat?) and being surprised to see the images for the first time in print. No editing beforehand, no Photoshopping afterwards, so we really took our time composing each picture and not wasting film, which wasn’t cheap. Now you can just keep clicking away and know that one out of 20 will be a keeper.
The advent of Polaroid in the early ’50s was like the advent of digital in the early ’80s—it was pure magic to see an image develop right in front of your eyes.
As a matter of fact, I recently read in the Innovation Issue of the Columbia Journalism Review that a small group of instant film lovers—Impossible Project— bought the last Polaroid factory on earth (the company folded in 2008), started it up again, and is selling more than a million packs of instant film each year. It seems the more we advance, the more we crave what we’ve lost or discarded.
So, I religiously go to my local pharmacy every few months where the only other people printing out photos on the self-serve machines (a wonderful invention and relatively inexpensive) are the same age as me.
Maybe it’s all for naught and after I die my kids will toss out all these generations of photos while they’re cleaning out my house. Or maybe they’ll decide to hold onto a tangible piece of their past—hold onto it in their very own hands and feel connected to something much bigger than the present.
Amy J. Barry is a Baby Boomer, who lives in Stony Creek with her husband and assorted pets. She writes reviews for Shore Publishing newspapers and is an expressive arts educator. Contact her at www.aimwrite-ct.net.