Photos
The first surviving photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras," was taken around 1826 (or 1827) by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The fact that it has survived for 200 years leads one to believe in the collectability of photographs. Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process.
Roll films popularized casual use by amateurs. In the mid-20th century, developments made it possible for amateurs to take pictures in natural color as well as in black-and-white. My father had a little darkroom and developed his own photos.
And everyone saved their photos, and put them in albums and stored them in drawers, by the thousands and millions.
I mention this because in our downsizing for the house sale one of the quandaries has been the photographs. Albums from grandparents are interesting but who would want them? And so many of the photos are of landscapes and buildings unknown to anyone.
As kids we had Baby Brownie cameras and I found many photos from that era. We have hundreds of wedding photos, both amateur and professional. Lovely, and repetitive.
Then we got good cameras, and it appears that we documented our lives thoroughly, with thousands of photos and, even more difficult, slides, which take a viewer or projector to view. These are great for remembering our lives, or showing to our kids, but they take storage space, which we no longer have. We are winnowing them and paring down to only a reasonable few.
With the advent of digital cameras, now all one’s photos can be kept in one’s hand. How often have you stood around while someone scrolls through a thousand photos to show you that one special item? One can laboriously scan your old photos to your computer, but life is short, and you still need discipline to actually view them.
How do you handle the photographs in your life? Is everything digital? Do you still look at old photos? What about your old media cards you can longer read, or know what’s on them? If you don’t prune down your collections, who will?
