Recently my father moved to a nursing home and I became custodian of the family photographs. In this role, I’ve been trying to see that my siblings have copies of our childhood pictures and pictures of family members who have gone before us. I believe that knowing your family history helps in developing your sense of identity.
Personally, I generated 35 albums of photos over the course of about 25 years. I weeded these down to six albums which I think is a reasonable amount to pass on to my only child. However, there are still tons of pictures left and someday I will have to bite the bullet and throw them away.
Looking at the situation from a more global point of view, it’s obvious that people who lived in the 1800s left many fewer photographs than we are generating today. By 1970 cameras were becoming common and nowadays we have pictures galore because of the cameras in our smart phones. Sales of single lens reflex cameras plummeted to virtually nothing around 2004 and sales of small digital cameras and phone cameras took over. An article in The New York Times reports that because of phone cameras, “The growth in the number of photos taken each year is exponential: It has nearly tripled since 2010 and is projected to grow to 1.3 trillion by 2017.”
How will we, as individuals, handle the oncoming flood of photos? There are all kinds of services to put your pictures on mugs, mouse pads, tee shirts, cakes, and other things; but if you are thinking of passing along family history, a book or album is probably the best way to go. Shutterfly, Snapfish, Blurb, Chatbooks, and lots of other photo services (including the one at Walgreens) will pull your pictures together into a book. You can create books around one subject or event or just print your pictures out chronologically.
So far I have hesitated to use these services because I prefer to arrange text and photos myself instead of letting some service impose a generic template on my stuff. Laying out The Suffield Observer using the programs Quark and InDesign has spoiled me for any kind of preset layout. However, the services mentioned above do advertise that you can create your own design, so I’ll probably give it a try.
Future generations may not be dealing with random collections of photos as I am, but instead may have accumulated a trove of books of neatly organized pictures. Then the question I’ve been pondering will have evolved into which books are worth saving to pass down to future generations.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.