Photographic memories are very important to me and I’ve been taking photographs for most of my life, so you’d expect me to have many pictures to cherish, but this needs to be placed into context. In the mid 1970s, whilst I first owned a camera, the cost of developing and printing a film was high, and so I took very few pictures. For a while, I developed and printed pictures at home using second-hand equipment and a makeshift darkroom (I used the family dining room after dark), but the results were very poor, and taking everything into account, the prints cost far more than if I’d just sent the film off for professional processing.
Therefore, I don’t have many photographs from my youth, and the few I do have are of dubious quality in both their subject and their reproduction. Before digital photography became readily available in the early 2000s, I took perhaps 100 photos per year (three 36-exposure films). For about a decade from 1993, I predominantly used a video camera to record my children growing up and so took very few still photographs. After about 1999, I began to take many more photographs and when smart phones became available the numbers mushroomed. Nowadays I take maybe 2,500 photos each year, although perhaps half of them get rejected. The effect of this is that the early photos (either prints or 35mm slides) hold far more value than the ubiquitous modern digital ones.
For several years I was very upset because I thought the old photo album that my Mum kept between 1948 until about 1972 had been lost forever. I think that this album originally belonged to my grandma, or maybe even great-grandma, so it was certainly an heirloom. My parents would take one roll of film per year (it was all they could afford), and most of their photos are of babies and children. In around 2010 when I wanted an old photograph of me as a baby to take part in a works Christmas fun quiz, I asked Frank if I could borrow the old green photo album. He had a quick look, and then told me that he didn’t have it, only the more recent albums. This was odd, since all the photo albums were bequeathed to him when Mum died in 2007. Frank suggested that perhaps Margaret had it. She didn’t, and a large-scale search by all the family proved unsuccessful. At Mum’s funeral, we had put this old album and several of Mum’s newer photo albums on a small table in St Chad’s club and invited any of the guests to take away any snaps by which they wanted to remember Mum. Of course, we meant only the newer photos, but I was worried that someone had taken the treasured green album. I was devastated, and for many years, each time I thought of that album, it was like having a melancholic blanket draped over me. Scroll forward a decade, and the album was discovered and I was delighted during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 to be once more reviewing those old photographs of my childhood.
I faced the winter months as a new retiree in 2018 with some trepidation. I have no trouble at all filling the long days of summer with bike rides, walks, gardening and just tinkering about outside. During the cold, dark winter months I was unsure how I would fill my time. It turned out that there were many things that I could find to do, and one of the more enduring activities involved reviewing all the photos I’ve ever taken, digitising them (if necessary), applying a critical filter to remove the dross and then filing them properly.
There is a secondary reason for this activity which is to keep ahead of obsolete technology. Paper photographs are fine, except that they tend to fade, and 35mm film slides need projectors which may not be around for much longer (or at least their bulbs may not be). At best, slide projectors are temperamental machines, and I’m not sure how easy it will be to keep mine working in the future. (I think that modern printers have the same temperament of slide projectors. Both have an irritating knack of going wrong at the most crucial time). So, over a couple of winters, I began digitising my prints and 35mm slides. There are specialist machines that claim to help with this process, but they are expensive and I wasn’t sure how well they would work. There are also many websites that offer to do this for you, they are even more expensive. In the end I elected to do it the simple way. I set up my ancient slide projector and used my phone to laboriously photograph each slide in turn. My logic was that there weren’t too many slides that I wanted to keep in digital form, and very often, the quality wasn’t high enough to begin with to justify the expense. My simple technique seemed appropriate to the quality. I used a similar but simpler technique with the paper photographs. Over many nights I managed to transfer all my paper photographs and slides into digital format and I now have a full record.
I faced a similar issue with the many hours of video I have accumulated. I have owned two video cameras; the first was bought at great expense in summer 1993 when we really couldn’t afford it. I decided that the opportunity of filming Emily (and later, Laurence) during their formative years was something I needed to invest in, and so I did, to the extent of £763 (that’s over £2,000 at 2024 prices). I replaced that machine eight years later with a much better model that cost 10% less. That’s the way of technology: it gets cheaper and better every year.
Consequently, I had about fifteen years’ of home videos which were initially recorded onto Hi8 video tapes. Each year I spent hours editing these original tapes to an interesting and watchable length, adding appropriate music and then storing the output on VHS tapes. This was an activity I used to do in November or December each year. I would always save a few days’ annual leave for emergencies, but by the end of the leave year (December, in my case) I had to use up this allowance or face losing it. So then I would take time off to write Christmas cards and also to edit that year’s video footage. It took serious concentration and no interruptions, so a couple of days off on my own proved ideal for this activity.
When VHS tape players started to become scarce, I transferred the content of the VHS tapes onto DVDs, and subsequently onto an external hard drive, all the time trying to ensure that I leave a legacy of memories to whoever might want to see it. And now, (finally, perhaps?) I’m storing stuff in the cloud on Google Photos. OK, I admit that I haven’t a scooby what that is, or whether it’s future-proof, but it offers me an illusion that I’m down with the kids, which is good. And at present, this is working well and I can share the files with the children, although how long I’ll continue to have that ability, Google only knows.
The finished videos themselves are rather long and probably very boring for most viewers. I invested so much time in creating them, that I still recall many of the details they hold, especially the music. This may have made the videos too long, but once I’d begun adding a musical background, I wanted to let the music end appropriately rather than just stopping abruptly. I’m sure that a good (or more ruthless) editor could cut them down to a quarter or less without losing their essence, but I couldn’t do that, at least at the time. It was my life I was discarding, so I kept all sorts of things that perhaps I shouldn’t have. If I had to edit them now, I’d cut out all the scenery and the panoramic shots since most of that is unlikely to change any time soon. But these are often the bits that have music over, so I’m back to being unable to cut bits out.
The electronic copies of all my prints and 35mm slides are all filed chronologically by quarter-year, on my computer, on a removable passport drive and also on line in Google Photos. The Google Photos version is best since I can search by title, date or even subject matter to quickly find the shot I want. I can also add all the locations where the photos were taken. People take this for granted now, since modern mobile phone cameras all have GPS receivers built in, but to have this facility for former paper prints is astonishing. The possible problem with using Google is knowing who actually owns the photos once they’re stored in the cloud. After I’m gone, would my children be able to access the files in the same way I can? I believe that there are processes that allow me to protect my digital legacy, but I haven’t done any research into this. I am relying on my passport drive and Laurence knowing how to access my files if necessary. Will protecting my photographs and videos be uppermost in his mind when the time comes? I suspect not, so perhaps I have more work to do here.
I think that I may be a bit unusual in that I like photographs that are not ‘mainstream’. I don’t just enjoy seeing the family shots showing a progression and development of people over time (although this is the core of what I like), but also the obscure, rarely photographed things. I look at old monochrome pictures from the days when each time you clicked the shutter you spent a noticeable amount of cash and think, what was the photographer’s mind when he or she took that photo? Was it for a personal reason, or did he/she have a more altruistic purpose, capturing the essence of a moment in time for some unknown person at a future date? The more candid types of photograph capture the mood far more effectively, giving modern viewers a truer sense of life at that time; the ordinary, lived life that we all experience but time-shifted to a different era. It’s for this reason that I have kept old photographs that many people would throw away, because they illustrate something of the period in which they were taken. For me, it is often of the cars of the time, but it could be fashion or any other transient item. I also much prefer candid shots rather than posed ones. If you aren’t grinning at the camera, this shows a more honest version of who you are even if the photos are not perfectly composed.
When sorting through old pictures, I have brutally discarded old landscapes from holidays long gone for a variety of simple reasons. It could be that I’ve forgotten where the photo was taken, and it thus failed to spark any memories, or perhaps I may recall where it was, but the scene itself is unchanging and so I ask myself the question what is the point of holding onto this grainy photo which I could re-take at any time, or even download an example from the internet which has better colour and clarity? These were just two of the criteria I used when discarding pictures, especially faded old paper prints from the 1980s. I have kept most of the ones featuring people, even if they are blurred, dark or otherwise unworthy of storage space, just to show how the people on the image have changed. Very often, the colour prints have been so affected by the light that the colours are lost, and in these cases, I have found it useful to convert them to monochrome. All that expense of buying Kodacolor film just to have that happen!
A short diversion. Recently, I received a book for Christmas from Laurence called ‘The 99% Invisible City’ which is ‘a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design’. It is a particularly apt book to buy me as a gift for three reasons:
- It talks to my tendency to be a nerd, but from a friendly I-know-where-you’re-coming-from position. (It was written by self-confessed nerds)
- It shines a spotlight on hidden aspects of cities most people never notice, like drain covers, street signs, bollards and pylons (all things that I have wanted to (or indeed, have) photographed in the past)
- It highlights hidden design features that go un-noticed (by most). I was delighted (in a nerdy way) that I was aware of more than 50% of the features included.
I include this diversion in this chapter since the book highlights to me that I am not alone in wanting to photograph and record everyday things before they disappear forever or become much less ‘everyday’. My act of saving unusual, non-mainstream photos might go some way, if only serendipitously, to correct this omission. The other thing to note about this particular gift is the fact it was Laurence who thought to give it to me. He clearly recognised that the book would appeal to me, but how did he know? Perhaps it was because the book had appealed to him (he’d been following 99% invisible podcasts for some time already) and he also realised that he is like me in so many ways (see chapter 4). (When writing this chapter, I went to the bookcase to look at this book once more and it’s missing. I have a vague recollection of lending the book back to Laurence after I’d read it. It hasn’t returned.)
I now own a book which belonged to my mum called ‘Over the Five-barred Gate’ which was written in September 1967 by George Birtill, a Chorley Guardian reporter. I remember that when it was published, I was delighted that my dad’s garden appeared on one of the photographs (not the house, just part of the garden). It is a paperback book of pictures of the villages north of Chorley taken by the author, with a short commentary about the background to each image. Simple in format, it is now a very precious document for me, since most of the photographs show scenes of the area where I grew up and played as a child.
One of the many ‘projects’ that I planned to do once retired was to travel round the region and take another photograph from the same viewpoint to see how much the scenes have changed over the years. I thought that this would be a straightforward task since there are only about 150 pictures and they’re all within five miles of home. But the theory and practice didn’t quite align. I have now taken most of the photographs, but trying to replicate the exact same image was surprisingly difficult. The original photos were often taken from a position in the centre of the road which isn’t something you’d want to try today with the speed and volume of modern traffic. In addition, taking a photograph with a different focal length changes the perspective. In many cases, the focal length originally used was less than the range of my camera (or phone) and there was nothing I could do about that. So getting the old and new pictures to align is tricky and very time-consuming. The page on my website comparing these photographs has been stuck at 25 images for the past year. I keep telling myself that it’s a winter job, but when winter comes, I find something else to occupy my time. Retirement, eh? Who’d’ve thought it would be so busy?
If you want to check on progress, click here.
I still really like handling physical images, and so in 2012, when Snapfish offered photo books for sale, I took advantage of this facility to create a modern version of the old photo album. These had fallen out of favour in the early 2000s when the digital revolution was accelerating. Photo albums typically held four 5”x4” prints per page and were ubiquitous in the 90s. Everyone received (and gave) them as Christmas presents since they were cheap to buy, but unfortunately, being cheap, most of them weren’t as durable as you would want. Snapfish offered an opportunity to boost the quality, vary the size and position of photos and even add captions to any number of images in a well-produced hardback book. So each year since 2012 I’ve selected a number of photographs which best describe the past year and had them made into a high quality book which costs about fifty quid – probably less than the equivalent cost of processing films and printing off images from negatives. I have even retrospectively created books from previous years back to 2004. This has also provided additional mitigation against the loss of all my digital photos, since I confidently expect books to outlive any digital storage. Being professionally printed, they should endure better than prints on made on photographic film which did tend to fade or discolour over time.
