Keeping things

Label your pictures!

Our photographer has just unearthed his first photo albums.  Not his first photos; those are in the archives and will be examined again sometime; but the first albums he made up when he thought that some of his pictures were worth looking at again and even showing to other people.  They contain at most a few shots from each roll of film, say 2-5% of all the pictures he took, so there is a selection.  (As we’ve noted, this is the hardest part of photography, and digital cameras only made it worse.)  He had no ideas of being any more than a snapshot photographer at this point.  He has pictures of landscapes and old buildings that are documentary.  That is, they are taken in the light he had from the viewpoints he could get to, and mostly just show he was there.  There are too many sunsets.  And there are pictures of people, a lot younger than they are now.

Are these albums worth keeping?  That is, could the space they take up be put to better use?  That’s a question that many of our fellow dinosaurs are facing now, as they downsize to move out of big houses into smaller ones.  We have always been constrained by our living quarters, so we’ve had to deal with it all along the way.  That doesn’t mean it’s easy to answer, or that it never comes up again.

The albums themselves are examples of old technology not intended to last forever.  The prints are held in place by transparent sticky plastic sheets, which can discolor and lose their stick over time.  And they no doubt do non-archival things to the pictures.  The pages are held together by glue as well, which has now failed in many cases.  It’s not what you would choose if your were a museum curator, though it did fulfill its purpose of showing our photographer’s results to friends over the span of a couple-three decades.

And most of the pictures are unexciting.  There are much better renditions of the Alhambra, the Tower of London and the Cascade Mountains.  The shot of the top of Mt. Fuji is notably blurred.  And photographs of sunsets. . . never quite live up to their promise.  As far as serious photography goes, our consultant would do best by using these as a guide to the very few that might qualify, then getting new prints made from the negatives and presenting them in a professional way.  Then he could discard this decaying stack of plastic.

But he’s not going to.  The pictures remind him of places he’s been and things he’s done, all worth remembering even if not worth reliving.  There are places and things that have changed or disappeared, no longer to be found.  And there are the people.  In some fit of competence he tried to label every picture with the place and time, and provide the names of all the people shown.  He missed some, but got most.  And these he finds really valuable after all these years.

What pictures you hang on to, and how, are up to you.  If they’re digital, they will already be labeled with the place and time.  But we strongly advise you to record all the people’s names!