Where Bloggers Live: Photo Albums
Welcome to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes? Every month a group of six bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, and more!
This month we’re sharing some of our photo album memories.
“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” ~ Aaron Siskind
As regular readers know, I’ve been selling off/getting rid of a LOT of things. One thing I’ve been slowly going through is photo albums – of which there are MEN. NEE. I’ve been dismantling them, taking all the photos out, tossing near duplicates (did I really need to take TEN pictures of Katie laying on her changing table, laughing at the Pee Wee Herman doll? Well, I mean, YES…but do I need to KEEP all ten??), scanning the “keepers,” and sending the hard copies off to family and friends.
I wish I’d taken a picture of all the albums before I started this process cuz I’ve already thrown out three or four, now emptied.
I was always “the picture taker.” Someone (I’m guessing my father?) gave me a Kodak Instamatic box camera when I started high school (ish). I loved that camera, and it was almost always hanging off my wrist with the handy wrist strap. So I have many pictures of friends, pets, houses, family throughout my lifetime…but very few of ME, ha ha. Cuz I was always the one taking the picture. These days almost everyone has a cell phone with a camera so everyone takes pictures of one another, which is nice.
BUT – gone are the days of photo albums and boxes filled with prints and negatives (or, in the case of my father, slides). People just leave pictures in their phones…or store them in the cloud…but to my mind, there is nothing like physically flipping through the pages of a photo album or stacks of photo prints.
My grandmother always had her five or six photo albums on a side table in the living room, beside a light grey-blue velvet-covered cushy rocker. I loved rocking there for hours every summer, going through the pictures, asking the questions: “who’s this?” “where were you?” etc, and learning about my family’s history in that way.
Side note: she always had pictures of Debbie Reynolds tucked into the albums, like she was family. I loved that 🙂
But now…pictures are sequestered away on our cell phones, they’re not just out in the open for people to flip through. And I think this is sad. An injustice to photos and people’s histories. I feel like Katie doesn’t know much about my history, our family’s history, because there were no pictures to prompt interest and question-asking.
So I’ve been trying to PRINT more. I have a dish on the table inside the front door that I keep photo prints in, as well as postcards, flyers from events I attended, etc. Sort of a memory box. I have it there for visitors…but I’m the only one who rifles through them from time to time, allowing them to bring back memories of times I’ve had with friends and family.
In addition to all my other projects (don’t know whether to laugh or cry), I think I’ll try to make a photo story book for Katie…as much of the story of our family as I can put together through pictures and captions. Something she can hold in her hands and flip through from time to time. To know who and what she comes from.
Memories Everywhere. That’s kinda nice, right??
Make sure to check out my friends blogs today, too:
Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own
Jodie Filogomo
We were just talking about the fact that photos are in the cloud now and aren’t appreciated. Yet we take millions every year. It really has evolved over time.
So I’m curious, why Debbie Reynolds?? Her crush??
XOXO
Jodie
http://www.jtouchofstyle.com
bettyewp
Yep. Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
Iris
Love that you’re going thru your photos. I started trying to do that when I started chemo (Years ago) but the project sorta got away from me. I, too, love those ‘printed’ photos. It’s just not the same on the phone! Hang in there, you’ll get them all sorted out one of these days.
Iris
bettyewp
ONE OF THESE DAYS! That’s been the theme song of my life. The Days have COME. It’s now or never.
Sally in St Paul
A beloved Pee Wee Herman doll?? Now that is not something I’ve heard of before… I love it!
It’s weird to me that I don’t have boxes of photos or albums with 6 versions of the same photo. I suppose I owe my previous self some gratitude for having curated my photos as well as she did! (I also didn’t have a lot of money for film + developing so that “helped” too.)
bettyewp
Oh gosh, I LOVED Pee Wee Herman! Lover Pee Wee’s Playhouse on Saturday mornings! Loved the movies! So when they came out with a talking doll, I was all over that! Once Katie was born I kept him on the changing table, cuz he could keep her amused and entertained while I changed her diaper or clothes.
I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I??
Eventually, the talking got slower and slower until eventually it was just garbled nothingness. And I think then I sold it on ebay for like $25 🙂
bettyewp
Oh, also, all my double prints were from a time when Katie was born and you could always get a second set of prints for free. So I did it, thinking I’d share them, but…plus, taking 20 of ESSENTIALLY the same shot (this was before digital) to be sure I got a good one (which, of course, was no guarantee). I kept all the negatives for a LONG time, too…but I finally just got rid of a bunch of them. Gotta draw the line SOMEWHERE.
Leslie Susan Clingan
Memories everywhere. I love that. I am going to borrow that because we have the same thing going on over here on every flat surface.
When my daughters were little we took a lot of slides. Not sure what our reasoning was. Probably cheaper to print slides. But now I have no idea where the slides have gone. Waaaaaa. Maybe the exhusband has them but I can’t imagine.
Your grandmother had such a great idea to have the photo albums out!! Imagine that. You probably learned so much about your family because the albums were out and you could enjoy the photos. Might need to try that with the scrapbooks over here I am so sure no one will ever look at. They could never find them tucked away in a drawer.
Your photography is especially lovely in this post. You have such an eye for taking pretty pictures.
bettyewp
I did love the Nanner albums. It was such a ritual, year after year. From the time I was little to an adult, they were always in that same spot next to that same chair. Once in a blue moon a new picture or album would be added…but it always seemed like mostly pictures from pre-60s to the 70s.
I think slides were cheaper to develop than prints. And then I loved once a year when my father would lug out the slide projector and clear off a living room wall…and we’d sit there for a couple hours going through all his slides from when they lived in Japan and Italy, and when my sister was a baby and a FEW from when I was a baby. They stopped in the late 70s cuz he died in 1982.
I can still remember the smell of the projector when it was running. It was such a 1960s smell.