At some point soon, I'm going to have to survey people about their thoughts and ideas behind the concepts of the family album, past and future.
I'm getting a fair few visitors to this blog, but not much feedback so far. So I thought I'd be more direct and ask for your opinions. Please be kind and take a few minutes to let me know the following:
Do you keep a physical family/photo album? Did you start it yourself or has it been passed down the family?
Where do you store your photos now? In albums? Online in folders? Why?
Do you have any opinions about which is better for you and why?
Do you miss printed photos?
I hope some of you who read this will let me know your thoughts. It will really help me to start asking the right questions and delving deeper into the subject.
Someone asked me the other day what I thought the difference was between the physical photo and the digital image.
The easiest way for me to describe what the difference means to me, is to imagine deleting a photo online.....now, imagine tearing up a photo. What does the difference mean to you?
Just a thought.
I have half of my family photos in print (pre digital) and these are stored haphazardly in a box in the loft and post 2003 on a hard drive. I keep meaning to sort the prints into an album and print the digital ones to include in the album.
ReplyDeleteI find the digital photos easier to access, should I need to find a photo, but the pre-digital photos have more value as they are the only copies I have. I would spend longer looking at a print than i would a file.
To answer your last question, tearing up a family photo would be heart-wrenching as I feel that it's a physical memory of the past. Deleting a photo would have te same impact but on a lesser scale as it's not a physical object.
Hope this helps x
Thank you B. I think a lot of people think similarly, but would be heartbroken as much if their computer crashed, as if they lost their albums in a fire. However the ease and convenience of digital imaging makes us lazy about keeping the physical album up to date.
DeleteWell to be honest I'm not one to hold emotional value to anything physical at all, I learned long ago that material possessions are less important than the feeling or memory you have; however flaky or fragmented that may be. A memory is always with you , sometimes a photograph can trigger that memory, but it is only a trigger. I guess the whole photograph album depends on the type of person you are, wether you need that type of stimulus to trigger your memory or if you re someone who can look deep into your heart to find it anyway. As a photographer its not the straight photographs that interest me, although I do have a smile when I come across people I once knew but since have lost contact from; or a picture of my kids 5 years ago to see how dinky they were. But then there are plenty of others like from when I was a kid at a wedding or a party with no recognisable face except mine and I feel nothing. I feel nothing when I see a photograph of my great great grandfather of whom I never met .... I know there are some very interesting photograph albums out there but for me my photo album is somewhere I could never loose it , its in me already. I hang pictures on the wall of my home of my children and sometimes there friends and special trips of our time, I guess that is where my family photograph album kind of starts ... And I have thought about creating a big book or table top album for the family of the family, but this is not for me as I am the photographer, if anything it will be for them xxxx My family xxx
ReplyDeleteThank you for a different opinion! I like different. It provokes! ;)
ReplyDeleteIs there any difference between the "physical" photograph and the digital image? I assume that your "physical" refers to a print from a silver-based negative/positive? If yes, then a print from film is little different from a print from a digital file. Noting, of course, that some Polaroids are unique... I see no difference between ripping up a print from film and deleting a file, save for the physical effort and what remains of the print. So maybe you should rephrase your question to refer to destroying a negative/deleting a unique digital file? There is significance in the reverse of this - a physical print is a physical print with a limited, usually singular audience - whereas an online image can have many more viewers, and can be downloaded/stolen and printed (of sorts).
ReplyDeleteA bit rambly, but you get my gist, yes?
Yes, I get your gist! I think it would depend on what the photo depicted and whether it was the only copy. Or if it was of someone now gone. I do need to word myself more carefully, and give more explanation to my thoughts. Thank you A.
DeleteI have about 13 years of digitl photos on harddrives at home, and a wealth of older prints taken by me and mandy.
ReplyDeleteMandy periodically goes through the digital photos that have been taken and prints out hardcopy, which she religously places in photo albums, we have photo albums for all the children (4) through the years, all neatly labeled with comments.
I love that someone else feels the same as I do. I'm glad to hear that the effort to print and place in the album is still there somewhere. Just out of interest, do you still write letters as a family? I think there is a similar theme with letters. E-mail has done away with the lovely feeling of getting a hand-written letter in the post. I think with photos, I miss the surprise you used to get with film. You never knew what was going to be in that envelope when you picked it up from the developers. Tell Mandy to keep up the good work!
DeleteMandy still writes letters to her sisters, and a best friend she has, but they are few, and very very long.
DeleteMe i can't write for shit amd apart from a few postcards over the years, have never managed to write letters.
One of my kids has a friend that moved to west sussex, and they have exchanged two letters so far.
Jack however writes love letters (he is 8) and fills in a 5 year diary every night.
I think email is a shit way of communicating, it's to casual and has almost sunk to the level of texting in my opinion, i would rather pick up a phone and talk to someone.
As for the suprise of opening the envelope with photos in it, yeah it's great as well as the surge of memories of the picture taking, but digital does take away the disappointment of the badly loaded film..
I think printing out the photos is the boss. It's much easier to show them to other people, you don't have to cram around a computers screen and faff about zooming and full screening, all digital really does is allow for more shots, so you can hopefully print the best out and keep it, the rest you could delete, but i bet noone ever does
Some of my most treasured shots are the mistakes, the pictures with a thumb in, or the ones where the head is cropped out! It shows not only the subject of the photo but brings back memories of the person behind the camera. Nobody prints their mistakes anymore. It makes me sad.
DeleteJust recently my partner's external hard-drive packed in and it contained 5 years of his work, but most importantly family images which he videoed, photographed etc. The loss for him is permanent and devastating.
ReplyDeleteOh no! My condolences. It's like losing the people all over again isn't it!
DeleteQ.Do you keep a physical family/photo album? Did you start it yourself or has it been passed down the family?
ReplyDeleteA.I have a few different forms of family albums: dedicated shoe boxes; wallets;traditional album books; The most treasured are those from my husband's and my childhood in the traditional book form of the album.
Q.Where do you store your photos now? In albums? Online in folders? Why?
A. The photographs I currently make are stored digitally in folders by year and subject. I shoot digitally and find it convenient to store these images digitally.
Q.Do you have any opinions about which is better for you and why?
A. Digital storage is a different type of collection: The form is less precious than my conventional albums but the content holds the same important for me. As an artist I love the the tactile quality of print material.
Q. Do you miss printed photos?
A.Hmm! I like shuffling prints in my hands but that is something I don't do much any more so I could say I do miss that. I usually carry a print of family when I travel and prop it up where ever I stay as a link to home. However, as an artist I extract images out of their family album context and use them in my art work, so they are re- appearing in my art- re- purposed from the private realm for public display.
Thank you so much for your thoughts Angela. I hope you will keep revisiting to see how my work is progressing!
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