Seen in a local antiques / old stuff store:
I know this is intended to be dear and funny, and you're supposed to smile, but I can't help but feel sadness in it; these are the shadows of actual people, who lived lives on Earth, and many of those souls have gone out of living memory. Of course, being remembered by posterity isn't a necessary condition for living, or having lived, a good, rich life, and many of the people in these pictures might have done so. But...still.
Making small, durable prints and mounting them on cards or in little folders was a great system for those strange imprints of the past we call photographs, but that system had one fatal flaw: it depended on individuals to notate the pictures with identifications, significances, dates, locations, and stories. For years I would counsel any kind of photographer to take a pencil and write on the back of prints the five W's:
- Who
- What
- When
- Where
- Why
...But of course few ever took such advice, and now there's nothing to write on. We don't even make prints for the most part. My beautiful grandson will be eight months old tomorrow, and I have dozens of lovely pictures of him (his mother is artistic, and a sensitive photographer), and they have a digital picture frame in their apartment where he is on ongoing display. He doesn't want for a photographic record of his first months. But I wonder if there has been even one paper print made of his image yet? It's possible not.
I looked at a few, and none of the pictures in that box that I saw had any writing on them. All those poor lost people were separated from their very names, much less any comment on their significance, their relationships, or any other specifics of their personhood. They go unrecognized now, forever.
The master box
In my wiser years, I've come around to a realization of the obvious, which is that photographs are only randomly durable, and mostly prove perishable. Transient. Consumables. Winking into existence in split-seconds, then later winking out again. I'm a guy who cares much more than the average bloke about pictures, and about the preservation of family pictures, but, when my father died, at the end of 2020, he arranged things such that all of his "archives," meaning, the entire record of my and my brothers' youth, and our family's activities (which he carefully documented, in beautiful little books of 5x7s), as well as all of his own historical family pictures he possessed going back well over a century, and—especially ironically—all of my own best photographs I had taken up until my middle teen years—including my first published photo, and the magazine it was published in—all of that—were lost for good. So if I can't see to it that such an extensive photographic record isn't lost, why would I expect that others would? Or could?
My updated advice (I harp on this): make a "heritage box." In one good-quality (waterproof! Crush-proof!) box, or perhaps two, put all the very best prints of your family pictures and your own prints, arranged, organized, and notated, and label the box "[Name's] Best Photos," or "[Name] Family Photos." Be very selective. These are the ones to store near the door and save in a house fire. If you haven't had time to organize and edit your archives, your children and grandchildren certainly won't. Make it easy on them. They might try to preserve everything, but it isn't likely. The more disorganized your archives, the more likely your heirs will just have to throw everything out, and your precious pictures will perish when you do. You might not mind if this happens, but maybe they will; or maybe their children will; and we should think of them. (Just my opinion.)
On the other hand, no one takes my advice—including, so far, me. So don't feel bad if you don't.
Is this post too much of a bummer? I think it is. I had intended it only to be dear and funny. Let's move on!
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Speed (partial comment): "Our son has been working since before COVID on digitizing, annotating, organizing and sharing almost 100 years of family photographs and videos. We were and are a family of cameras and occasionally video cameras. It's not unusual for family members to spend an hour or two together on Skype reviewing photos and documents (thank you, Ancestry), bringing back memories and telling stories. One day we visited (by appointment) the archives of a university attended by three generations of us, to view and copy student lists and documentary photographs. It's been a lot of work. Happy work. And, once done, thanks to almost unlimited and nearly free storage and sharing, work that will endure and hopefully won't need to be repeated."
Andreas: "Is it a bummer? No, it isn't. Keep reminding us to sift, sort, tag, edit and back up (!!) our collections. Doing so might be a drag, but later it is a breeze to find just this one picture. And having an album with family pictures is always worth the effort: our kids and grandchildren will love it."
ritchie thomson: "A few years ago I was visiting my parents, and we were drinking tea at the kitchen table, when my Mum said 'your father has thrown away all of his old slides.' I didn't speak for a moment, as I found this hard to take in. Thinking I must have misheard, I asked, 'What, all the photographs he took from the early 1950s to the 1990s?' 'Yes.' I couldn't say anything for a while. I thought about some of the lost photos, all the family history Dad had recorded with Kodachrome and his Pentax Spotmatic F. I had to calm myself down a bit before saying anything. I was taken aback but I didn't want to show just how much, in case it upset Dad, who was in his late eighties. Eventually I said calmly, 'Why did you do that Dad?' He said, 'I haven't got a projector anymore.'"
Stan B.: "If anything, it serves as a realistic reminder. We often photograph for posterity; sadly, it's a short lived one...I often think about the nearly impossible odds that were somehow, almost magically averted to salvage the work of Vivian Maier."
Elsa Louise: "Your father sounds like he was a spiteful man. Why else would he have made certain to destroy what, to many, would be a family heirloom?"
Mike replies: Unfortunately, he was just the type to do it out of spite, or perhaps "lack of regard" would be a better term, but I have consciously decided not to blame him for it, but to believe, instead, that it was a succession of circumstances rather than a conscious decision on his part. The run-up to his death lasted about eight months, and started when he had some sort of medical event and went to the hospital. He never went back to his little apartment as far as I know. He ended up in a rehab center where the staff were under strict instructions not to reveal anything about him to anyone. My brother (a doctor) kept calling the rehab center asking for news for more than a year after our father's death, and they never told us that he had died, or that he was no longer in residence there, or indeed anything at all. In addition, his death certificate listed "dementia" as the cause of death, so I can forgive him on that level as well. On the other hand, in the mid-2010s he tried to ransom the family photos—he approached my mother and demanded $3,000 for them. As we all had learned to do, she chose not to engage. I should have just paid him what he asked at that time. I could have afforded it then. Life is inevitably full of regrets.
Lisa S. Gorrell: "I think it's sad, too. I have friends who purchase these photos if there is identification on them and then try to locate descendants in order to return the photos. There are places like DeadFred.com, where photos could be uploaded and perhaps identified. Often there were more than one copy of the photo sent to family members and someone else might have the same photo identified."
Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "Note that there actually is a very lively niche market for anonymous photos! For example, I have an acquaintance who has devoted decades to collecting these photos. His collection is so richly built that he has donated subsets of it to museums (for examples, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago) and lent them to artists who have used them to curate and create some terrific artistic publications. Yes, the subjects are still unknown…but, hey, so are the subjects of so many of the world’s most beloved paintings! In the end, I am more saddened by the loss of materiality in popular photography. I second your admonition, and encourage everyone to, at the very least, get their family and friends photos printed."