At long last and after much creating, shuffling, stacking, and moving of photo piles, I finished getting my family photos into some kind of order this past weekend.
It's satisfying to see the results: a nice-sized box of original photos waiting to be given to my sister and brother, a rough pick of shots to use in the photo books CJ Madigan is making for me through her newly-under-development Snapshot Stories book creation product, and three neat boxes of photos to keep here. One of the benefits (aside from the general pleasure of neatness) is that I can actually enjoy the pictures now, rather than having to rummage around searching when I wanted to use or look at one.
I don't usually mention products, but I must say that the Creative Memories PowerSort photo boxes I used for this project were a nearly perfect solution both for the sorting process and now for my storage needs. I have no relationship with Creative Memories, so I don't mention this with any agenda; I just love it when folks come up with truly useful and ingenious solutions for problems, and appreciate a product that does exactly what it says it does and more. The large versions each hold a whopping 1,200 photos in durable, waterproof, portable and photo-safe fashion (photo safety is important to everyone, but portability and waterproofing are especially crucial to those of us who live in hurricane zones). The twelve mini-containers that can go into and out of each box helped me break down the collection by groups (photos of mom, photos of dad, photos of them together, etc., etc.) and made the sorting much easier than it would have been without them. They're not cheap, but they're immensely more useful than the ordinary little photoboxes I tried to use before.
Having finally gotten everything collected in one place, I was shocked to see that I had over three thousand actual hard-copy photos even after I'd made big boxes for my siblings. That number seemed ludicrously large until I thought about it. I took several hundred shots on every one of my major vacations; each family Christmas probably contributed another fifty or more, each new neice and newphew were good for several hundred over the years...the list goes on and on. When I thought about it this way, I was actually surprised that I didn't have more photos.
Digital photography will reduce these numbers for generations to come; they'll be able to store images on disk rather than having each and every picture developed and printed. I'd like to think that will make their lives easier when it comes to family photos. But then I remember how much most of us struggle to keep our data backed up and deal with computer meltdowns, as well as how many more images most of us take now that we're digital...and I think that it'll be just as hard for them, just in a different way.
Showing posts with label photograph. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photograph. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
PHOTOGRAPHS, past and present
To give myself some respite from the computer, I spent some of Labor Day weekend sorting through photographs of my late mom and dad. My friend and colleague CJ Madigan is going to create small books from them using her new Snapshot Stories format (I'm a test subject; watch her web site for its introduction later this fall, and this blog for a peek at my books when completed.)
Looking through old photos is a mixed blessing once you've lost close loved ones. The sight of their faces in a picture is bittersweet, reminding you that they are no longer here yet at the same time recalling happy times together. My own photo "shoebox" had scores of wonderful shots, an abundance that made choosing among them difficult.
Today, most everyone has that same kind of overstuffed shoebox (or album, or drawer). The most obvious reason for this is that these days anyone can take a photo, from almost any kind of device from the most elaborate camera to the simplest cell phone. Anyone can print that photo, too, at least anyone who has access to a drugstore photo lab or a home computer. How different this is from my childhood, when developing a negative required both expertise and a special room full of expensive equipment, much less from the early days of photography when the camera, too, was expensive and difficult to use.
But it's not just technical issues that allow us to take photographs for granted today. We also enjoy long life expectancies and relatively easy, relatively affordable travel. It's fairly easy, most of the time at least, to see the people we have photographs of. The exact opposite was true in the early days of photography. Travel was dangerous and expensive; families that were separated might not see each other for years, if ever. Death was an everyday fact of life, taking away everyone from infants to children to mothers and on. The rich could afford portraits of those from whom either death or other circumstance had separated them, but others could not.
And so a photograph was not just a pleasure, but a prize. Here is Jane Welsh Carlyle, the wife of celebrated author and intellectual Thomas Carlyle, writing on the subject in 1860: "Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to—this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones."
That reference to chloroform is worth noting; it wasn't one that was made lightly. Ether and chloroform, the first general anesthetics, were still relatively new in 1860 (Queen Victoria, for example, had not used one until the birth of her eighth child in 1853). To set photography above chloroform, a substance that relieved horrendous labor or surgical pain, was to praise it highly indeed.
So while culling down my pile of "possible" photos was a chore, I tried not to forget that it was also a privilege. We are indeed lucky today, not just to have the luxury of easy photography (and easy book-making services like CJ's) but also to have the blessing of the long and healthy lives that let us enjoy each other in person.
Looking through old photos is a mixed blessing once you've lost close loved ones. The sight of their faces in a picture is bittersweet, reminding you that they are no longer here yet at the same time recalling happy times together. My own photo "shoebox" had scores of wonderful shots, an abundance that made choosing among them difficult.
Today, most everyone has that same kind of overstuffed shoebox (or album, or drawer). The most obvious reason for this is that these days anyone can take a photo, from almost any kind of device from the most elaborate camera to the simplest cell phone. Anyone can print that photo, too, at least anyone who has access to a drugstore photo lab or a home computer. How different this is from my childhood, when developing a negative required both expertise and a special room full of expensive equipment, much less from the early days of photography when the camera, too, was expensive and difficult to use.
But it's not just technical issues that allow us to take photographs for granted today. We also enjoy long life expectancies and relatively easy, relatively affordable travel. It's fairly easy, most of the time at least, to see the people we have photographs of. The exact opposite was true in the early days of photography. Travel was dangerous and expensive; families that were separated might not see each other for years, if ever. Death was an everyday fact of life, taking away everyone from infants to children to mothers and on. The rich could afford portraits of those from whom either death or other circumstance had separated them, but others could not.
And so a photograph was not just a pleasure, but a prize. Here is Jane Welsh Carlyle, the wife of celebrated author and intellectual Thomas Carlyle, writing on the subject in 1860: "Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to—this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones."
That reference to chloroform is worth noting; it wasn't one that was made lightly. Ether and chloroform, the first general anesthetics, were still relatively new in 1860 (Queen Victoria, for example, had not used one until the birth of her eighth child in 1853). To set photography above chloroform, a substance that relieved horrendous labor or surgical pain, was to praise it highly indeed.
So while culling down my pile of "possible" photos was a chore, I tried not to forget that it was also a privilege. We are indeed lucky today, not just to have the luxury of easy photography (and easy book-making services like CJ's) but also to have the blessing of the long and healthy lives that let us enjoy each other in person.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
BIG PICTURE, SMALL LENS
Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron's little book My Mother's Clothes: An Album of Memories 
recently reminded me that we sometimes create the most vivid memorials to those we've loved and lost when we give ourselves permission to to notice small things rather than stretch for big meaning.
(If you follow my Working Writer Wonders blog, you will remember a recent post about the same book, in a different context.)
In her prime, Barron's mother Ellie was what we once called a clothes horse, a woman who loved exquisite garments and owned a lot of them. Later in life, as her memory began to fail, her daughter began to photograph her clothes to help spark recollections. The images in the book--of dresses and stockings, purses and bathing caps, hangers and size labels--thus have a double resonance. The project may have begun as an aid to the mother's memory, but in the end it also became a way to sustain the daughter's.
There are only a very few pages of photographs of Eleanor herself, and they come right at the very end of the book. But the simplicity of the still life photos and the very brief text Barron wrote to accompany each such a rich, specific picture that I barely noticed their absence. I felt Ellie's presence. I felt the pain of the absences her Alzheimer's and then her death created. I felt that in some way I knew Barron herself as well, knew some of the ways her personality was shaped in response to her mother's.
Barron makes no grand claims for her mother or her book, describes few of the details in a traditional biography, and offers few if any grand words about "big" concepts like values, legacy, or the meaning of life and death. Maybe that exactly why her lovely little work speaks so clearly...because it pays such quiet and devoted attention to the small choices that, in the end, comprise a life.
My own mom's personal style was completely different from that of Barron's mom, yet the book sparked so many of my own memories. If you're a daughter like me, I bet it will do the same for you whether your mother is living or not. Her web site is worth a visit, too; click here to visit the page where she talks about the book and its inspiration.
recently reminded me that we sometimes create the most vivid memorials to those we've loved and lost when we give ourselves permission to to notice small things rather than stretch for big meaning.(If you follow my Working Writer Wonders blog, you will remember a recent post about the same book, in a different context.)
In her prime, Barron's mother Ellie was what we once called a clothes horse, a woman who loved exquisite garments and owned a lot of them. Later in life, as her memory began to fail, her daughter began to photograph her clothes to help spark recollections. The images in the book--of dresses and stockings, purses and bathing caps, hangers and size labels--thus have a double resonance. The project may have begun as an aid to the mother's memory, but in the end it also became a way to sustain the daughter's.
There are only a very few pages of photographs of Eleanor herself, and they come right at the very end of the book. But the simplicity of the still life photos and the very brief text Barron wrote to accompany each such a rich, specific picture that I barely noticed their absence. I felt Ellie's presence. I felt the pain of the absences her Alzheimer's and then her death created. I felt that in some way I knew Barron herself as well, knew some of the ways her personality was shaped in response to her mother's.
Barron makes no grand claims for her mother or her book, describes few of the details in a traditional biography, and offers few if any grand words about "big" concepts like values, legacy, or the meaning of life and death. Maybe that exactly why her lovely little work speaks so clearly...because it pays such quiet and devoted attention to the small choices that, in the end, comprise a life.
My own mom's personal style was completely different from that of Barron's mom, yet the book sparked so many of my own memories. If you're a daughter like me, I bet it will do the same for you whether your mother is living or not. Her web site is worth a visit, too; click here to visit the page where she talks about the book and its inspiration.
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