A Fist Full of Photos
Coliseum, Rome, 1988
Originally uploaded by chuckm. This weekend I began the process of putting my old, paper photos into albums. This is a huge innovation over my old storage mechanism -- tossing them all in a giant box -- which I've been using for decades.
The first thing I noticed is that paper photos don't automatically sort themselves chronologically. I looked for menus. I tried right-clicking. I hit every function key. They just sat there in random piles on the floor. Not even very neat piles.
So I began hand sorting them. This is when I noticed the second thing about paper photos -- there are no keywords or tags to help you identify where/why they were taken. In fact, most of them don't even have dates on them (although some of the newer ones do have dates printed on the back, which I guess is something). Paper photos give you very little context data.
The best example is a pile of photos from a trip to Europe I took when I was 14. Some of the photos were immediately memorable: me standing on a column in the Coliseum; views from a hill my friend Chris and I climbed (a story many of you have heard); the ceramic rooftops in Rothenburg. But most of the time I seemed to be feeding an apparent obsession to document every castle, church, and mountain in Europe. Looking at this pile the only thing they tell me is that "Europe has lots of castles, churches, mountains, and twisty little passages... all alike."
It was then I realized I am in possession of photos I have taken, but but can no longer associate with a particular place or event. I am in the ludicrously emotional situation of having to throw these photos away. I say ludicrously emotional because on the one hand, here is physical, irrefutable evidence that there were events and situations that I have personally experienced and can no longer remember. But at the same time these photos have been sitting in a box for years or even decades without me thinking about them or wanting to see them. How much do I really cherish the memories they document?
So a bunch of photos went into the bin, and the rest are going into a series of albums. These are the distilled visual memories of events in my past. I'm in the process of filling album number two right now, with number three soon to be purchased. The big question is, will I end up looking at the final product any more often than I use to dip into that giant box?