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.
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Friday, December 4, 2015
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
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
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