Nostalgia and Old Photos

I bought my first digital camera in 2008.  I actually bought three that year.  This was shortly before the motorcycle trip to Alaska, and I decided a very small digital camera made a lot of sense given the premium that space was going to be on the trip.  I loved my tank-like Pentax K-1000, but carrying it and a couple lenses was out of the question.  The first camera was a very small Leica that in some ways was form over function.  It broke en route to Alaska and was replaced by the much more capable Nikon CoolPix, purchased in Fairbanks.  The screen on the Nikon camera recently quit while going to The Keys this year, but the camera still functioned.  The Leica should have been discarded long ago; both the Leica and the Nikon were disposed of after the Keys trip, replaced with a new Nikon CoolPix that I can only hope will last as long as the 2008 model.
The third digital camera purchased in 2008 was a Kodak P850 and is still functioning well.  While low resolution by 2015 standards, the optics are actually quite good.

Prior to 2008, all my photography was 35mm.  As a result, I, like many others, have several boxes of developed pictures.  Some of these are semi-organised, but there are two boxes that were just a scattering of photos ranging from my infancy (very few) to sometime around the year 2000 when I got much more organized in photo storage.
Earlier in the year, I had uploaded most of my digital pictures to Google Photos.  The ability to have unlimited storage of pictures at a size that is reasonable for all but the most optimistic artistic uses is quite a valuable service.  Yes, I suppose Google can paw through them and they could get hacked resulting in my fishing pictures from 2009 being exploited, but I'll take the minor risk of that in trade for the service.  After loosing many pictures to a hard drive crash several years ago, I believe strongly in redundant storage.
With time available around Thanksgiving, I recently spent a few hours selectively scanning in older pictures to be uploaded, borrowing a very convenient Go Doxie scanner for the task.

Looking through the pictures brought back a lot of memories - which is I suppose why the pictures are taken in the first place.  What I was struck by, was the nostalgia the pictures brought.  Some negative, but most positive.  Even pictures which came from times that in retrospect were difficult, maybe even unhappy, seemed smoothed over in a way I didn't think was possible - especially looking back at that time.
The most evocative pictures were taken of my first two houses.  I only had a very small number of pictures taken of my first house, with slightly more of my second.  Both of those houses were moved into after stints in apartments which I hated, so the positive memories of being on top of the world on moving into my own building on my own piece of the planet is perhaps understandable.  It is easy to look back on the first house and try to construct a memory of how simple things were then.  But in reality, it was far from simple.  I was working two jobs, basically living paycheck to paycheck.  I was in school with very little time for anything else.  The memory of things being simple is just a mental construct.
Similarly, my financial situation on moving into my second house was far from rosie.  I was unsure of my job choice and there was a general, but intense, unease for the future.
Despite (seemingly) significant financial, work, and personal issues, I remember the energy available to clean, repair, improve, rebuild the first house as something special.  I see that occasionally in other people moving into their first house.  Over the last 25 years, that energy is easy to replace with contentment (not complacency).

There were also several pictures of various vehicles I owned that brought on nostalgic memories.  Digitizing the few pictures of my first car, I know the rose colored glasses were on as I thought about life at the age of 16.  I had to try to put it in a more realistic perspective; I'm somewhat surprised that the pictures are tinted in a red hue, given how awful the mid-teens were.  But I guess that first car was a bright spot, and even quite important to my eventual future.
I was also surprised about some of the things that I could not find any pictures of.  In 2015, there are multiple digital pictures of just about everything, no matter how trivial.  I could not find any pictures of my first motorcycle, something I see as quite depressing now.  I could only find a few images of my favorite truck, a 1994 Ford F-150 purchased as a graduation present to myself after college.  But these images are just in the margins of pictures of other subjects.  Several other vehicles are completely non-existent, seemingly erased forever from photographic memories.

There is probably a genetic reason for the more generally positive view of the more distant past, but I'm not sure why that would be.  It is likely quite dangerous, as it could easily lead to discomfort or discontent with the present.  The Germans have a word for this, weltschmerz:  World weariness or discomfort with the present, especially in relation to an ideal state.

This nostalgic view of the past could also lead to dire atavistic behaviors.  Quitting the job and trading everything for the relive of the college lifestyle would appear, and be, quite reckless.
"Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation."  -Robert Pirsig
Still, there is that ever present current...

I have the pictures to temporarily relive events like my first house, first car, first deer, but while the pictures are real, the memories will be somewhere between distorted and created.  The rosie nostalgia is evidence of this.
And that ends up being the real reality of the pictures.  The pictures, like the memories, like nostalgia, only show a single snapshot in time.  This snapshot, whether in silver halide/gel form, ink on paper, digital, or grey matter, is edited by the brilliantly feeble brain to be something that never was, even though it seems so real.  The shutter of a camera lasts a fraction of a second and the reality captured is just that brief.

It is easy to look at pictures an assume, maybe even hope, that the memories are just as real, but they are a modern personal mythology.  They are reality completely assimilated with Aesop's Fables, Zeus and Apollo and Harold and the Purple Crayon all combined into one narrative.

“It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past." — Jim Bishop