DO YOU REMEMBER PHOTOGRAPHS?
Do you have boxes of old photographs in the cupboard or in the loft? How much do you love discovering a forgotten box and leafing through the photos? Holding the prints in your hand and letting that photograph transport you back in time.
When I left university I spent 6 months travelling in South America. It was back in the era of film where I was more worried about my film getting lost or ruined than I was about my passport. I shot a crazy amount of film and had the most amazing time out there. Within 24 hours of landing back in the UK I'd managed to injure myself and ended up on crutches. How I managed to travel around South America without catching malaria, getting mugged (there were near misses...), not loose my luggage or injure myself and then come back to a sleepy village and end up in hospital has never ceased to amaze me.
Anyway being rather immobile gave me a great opportunity to sort through all the hundreds of photographs I had taken and get them into some sort of order. I now have 3 fantastic albums all beautifully labelled and with everyone's names neatly written beneath the photograph. When I have a quiet moment I love getting those albums off the shelf and leafing through them. The albums are looking rather battered now but the photographs in them still mean everything to me. Would I still want to look at them if they were on a CD? Maybe, but it wouldn't be the same experience. And I wouldn't necessarily be able to remember where the photographs were taken and after this long I definitely wouldn't be able to remember the names of the people in them.
How many of you have old photographs and you wonder who is in them and then you just turn it over and someone has helpfully written the date and where it was taken. That's our history. I feel passionately about the value that printed photographs have in preserving that.
I'm never going to stop printing photographs. Yes, the digital revolution is great in many ways but I think the CD should be the back up, not the only medium for storing our memories. It's not that long ago that floppy discs were the way we stored data. My dissertation at university is stored on a floppy disc. I never got a second copy printed for me as I thought it didn't matter as I could always print one off the disc. Now I have no way of reading that disc.
Something printed is never going to date. I made a promise to myself several months ago that Noah wold have an album for every year of his life. An actual printed, physical record of his childhood. He will probably be unusual amongst his peers who will have their baby photographs saved on iphones, computers and DVDs. But I think he will be far richer for it and he just might thank me for it one day.