02 October 2013

Real photos

Once upon a time, in the days before digital photography, the film had to be given in, or sent away, to be printed - and the photos, 24 or 36 per film, stored in their envelopes (with the negatives) or, for people who shot a film every week or so, in shoeboxes. 
I used boot boxes to hold two ranks of photos - arranged by subject ... dates and places of trips, types of objects seen in museums, categories of landscape features. Quite a little system, three double boxes full.
A random selection from the "museums" category, possibly useful in the near future for my course.
Mostly the accumulated photos are redundant - "plants" and "trees", for example (well, it seemed important at the time) - except that seeing them brings back memories around taking them, the where and the who and the what else, and even the why.

Rather than spend all day sorting photos, I pulled out a few to scan in ... photos with people, photos taken last century. This one is from August 1987 - we're on the way back to Pitt Meadows from a family visit to Denman Island - 
Arithmetic can be applied to the situation: I am older now than my mother was then, and my son is almost as old now as I was then. But when I look at the photo, all that logical part of my brain shuts down, and lots of other things come flooding in.

1 comment:

Cate Rose said...

I keep photos in a plastic shoebox, everything I've got in one box. In sections, as you do. It's way more convenient (and far less expensive) than putting all the photos into those ghastly photo albums that line most people's shelves. I've also thrown out A LOT of photos over the years -- people who aren't in my life anymore and who I don't want to have to remember, duplicates I simply don't need, etc.