Part 4, Project 3, Exercise 3: Family Photos

 Exercise 3

Family photos are often cited as being the possessions that people would most want to save from a house fire. Why do you think that photographs are such a significant part of our lives? Write down how you feel about photos – or videos – from your family’s past. Will this archiving be affected by the digital revolution? Do you have images languishing on your hard drive that you keep meaning to process? Is flicking through images on someone’s phone or digital photo frame as potent as looking through an album or sorting through a box of photos? Or is it better?

There are several things that come to mind when i think about the photos of my family from the past. Firstly, the photos of my own children. I have several scrapbooks of my eldest daughter, born in 2008 and long before I could afford a camera phone and so the books are filled with hard copies of my baby daughter. There are a few digital images of her as she was born during the early days of Facebook. My second daughter however, the format of her photos are somewhat reversed. It is a novelty to have hard copies of her photos, I in fact bought a polaroid camera after she was born in 2017 for that purpose. 

Secondly, i think about my relatives, such as my parents and siblings. The scrapbooks contain images that include them, though in all honesty i have not seen or spoken to them for many years. Some of the photos i have, even of me as a baby with my grandparents, prompt painful emotions due to bereavements, abuse and estrangements. I know that when me and my siblings were children, my parents bought a very large and very heavy camcorder from which remains videos of us when i was around the age of 4 or 5. I don't know where the tapes are currently. I do have memories of my mother bringing out bin bags full of photos and me and my siblings would gather on my parents bed and rifle through them. I think needless to say, i am grateful that photos can be stored in a less space consuming and damaging way, though there is something nostalgic about looking through hard copies of photographs.

Thirdly, a few months ago a cousin sent me some photographs she had inherited from her father/my uncle, of my ancestors. She had heard i was interested and once attempted to trace my family tree, so seeing the images of my great great grandparents and great great aunts and uncles was really precious to me. I loved seeing the similarities and enjoyed showing them to my own children as part of their heritage. 

Its amazing that those photos have survived as long as they have and have been passed down. I like to consider what those people would make of today's photographic technologies!

The hard copies of the photos I have especially of my young daughter are the only images I have of her as a baby, and are of great value to me and those would endeavour to preserve or ‘save from the house fire’. But that in itself makes me all the more grateful that I have the technology and means to have records of my children throughout their lives in digital format, where they are harder to be damaged. I do wonder how all of these photos will affect my children when they grow up, will they feel exposed, or annoyed? I hope they will also find insight into their own lives and how they've grown, and it gives them something to pass on to their children and so on. I also believe that actual printed photographs may have something of a vintage trend about them as they already are starting to! 

There has been a saying online, that goes something like ‘think it's just a photograph? Wait until it's all you have left of them’. In the last few years having lost people I was particularly close to, and like most bereaved people I have placed immense value on those photos that prove they were a very real part of my life and helped me to grieve them, especially by remembering the moments in those photographs.

I think photos are so important, no matter what format they are in. even if they are only on a hard drive, at least they exist and can be uncovered. They are proof of a life’s existence. Looking through other’s photographs can be such a privilege too, seeing the images that they have chosen to share in one way or another is to be invited into someone’s experiences, into their family and friends, and into the things they deemed important enough to record with a camera. Even today, when becoming ‘friends’ on facebook or instagram one of the first things most of us do is look through the other’s photos that they have published.