I recently got back from a week away. It is a trip I've done for many years, typically in January. When I got home, I quickly looked through the pictures I took - a fraction of what I used to take when this annual excursion was more novel - and dumped the pictures into my vacation archives, also uploading them to Google Photos. I usually have a couple pictures I'll take to work to add to the pile that are used as part of my screen saver, but I was conscious that I didn't do that this year.
Reflecting on this, I think digital photography has robbed me of something. By getting more, I have much less. My Google Photos currently has 1323 pictures from 2016. A fraction of those are great and may be viewed occasionally or shared. I may at times scan through the bulk of them to look back at past vacations. But it is, frankly, too many...
Digital photography has brought a lot of improvements. We can't put the bullet back into the chamber on this one. By being able to take lots of pictures, more good photos will emerge and a few more great ones are possible. Still, 35mm cameras, and the expense of film, development, prints, enlargements, brought with it a scarcity mindset - carefully taking one or two pictures instead of today's 30 or 40. "I can delete them later." I rarely do. Careful review on the small camera LCD screen isn't practical. Why not just dump to archives and upload to Google Photos? Who has time to go through 218 pictures while on vacation?
Joe Bonomo wrote about The Blur Family in the book Brief Encounters. The book includes the actual picture which is sadly not present in the online version.
Reading through this, the memories and emotions it brings up sound more vivid, scream louder than if the person taking the photograph would have stopped and retaken the shot again (and again, and again) to "get it right" - by the fourth take, the faces may have been clear, but they would have been distracted by the annoyance of the uncomfortable stagedness of the picture; the younger children probably looking forlornly down at their Thanksgiving plates, the older kids rolling their eyes. Maybe they were anyway, but the poor (blurry) photography allows more historical interpretation.
Photography was even more prohibitively expensive when Mr. Bonomo's picture was taken (as an aside, why exactly he has a copy of a neighbor's Thanksgiving celebration is quite curious); I lived through this era as well. There are many family photos which might be viewed as either regretful and awkward, or cherished, depending on the viewer. It probably also depends on one's state of mind at the time of the viewing.
I loath the fakeness of 1970's portrait photography. Olin Mills pictures with one dimensional fake backdrops and awkward props up front. Why a suburban northern family pays large sums of money for a family photograph with a wooden wagon wheel in the foreground is oddly troubling. Maybe this still goes on today. If high school "senior pictures" are an indicator, things really have not improved.
Somewhere around 23 years ago, there was an attempt to create one of these family portraits for posterity for our family, recently expanded by marriage. My SO wisely stayed out of it. A step-sibling's SO did not, and when that relationship soured, the portrait was altered to change the now non-SO into a large potted plant. The plant stands strangely out of place. Computer generated people censoring the original vision of Kubrick's movie Eyes Wide Shut, new characters added to the bar scene in Star Wars, a sock puppet planted in a Ruben painting.
Somewhere, I may have a copy of the original picture. That picture is a historical record - a vision at least closer to the reality of how things existed. One SO not shown, one SO an example of what we've all been through. If I come across that original picture, I'd like to get it enlarged to cover over the altered picture. Revert history to its original copy. Maybe history written by the victors can be rewritten by the small.
I find adults arguing about Facebook as perplexing (this should end somewhere around junior high school), but was recently encouraged that someone wanted to download a picture that was never posted for a memory book. I was encouraged that anyone creates memory books anymore, assuming it is a physical book and not some dreadful Facebook tool...
I had one picture from my 1970's memory book that I hated - hated with a passion. I guess I could have altered it; added the potted plant over me wearing a football helmet on my bike. But no, I removed it. The memory that remains after the picture has been discarded. I hate that memory too, but at least the physical manifestation is gone.
I sometimes wonder if the negative exists somewhere in a dusty cardboard box somewhere. Piles of negatives are the silver halide version of Google Photos, I guess. Over the ensuing decades, it is almost a certainty that the negative is long gone.
I have boxes of 35mm pictures as well. Much like I have too many google photos, I probably have too many 35mm as well - just not nearly as many. But I did recently go through them, trying to find at least one picture taken while in each state. I was surprised how easy it was to find what I was looking for since the boxes of photos (and negatives) are roughly in chronological order. Digital (Google Photos) imitates Analog...
Maybe my omission of a picture to be used from my recent adventure for my work screen saver was just a temporary oversight. After thinking about it, I grabbed one from Google Photos and dropped it in my work computer's screen saver folder.
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