JANUARY 25, 2021 – In retirement, my dad took lots of photos with his classic Canon AE-1 SLR. He didn’t snap away indiscriminately. He made judicious use of his 36mm film and was persnickety about what he “shot” and how. Film was too expensive and his eye too sharp for a shotgun approach.
After Dad died, I found hundreds of his photos neatly filed chronologically in a small, metal, two-drawer case. It was a veritable treasure chest. I picked admiringly through the “gems”—for 15 or 20 minutes—before moving on to other treasures (his writings) he’d left behind.
The treasure chest of photos hasn’t been opened since.
Yesterday I thought about that as I confronted a chronic, large-scale problem: my digital photographs hogging real estate on phone, laptop, and back-up hard drive, not to mention the cloud, and not counting three malfunctioning digital cameras and an old laptop with a “dark” screen. The total number of accessible digital images is well over 30,000. I’ve failed utterly at any organized approach to storage and curation. Give a guy a shotgun and he’ll shoot up the whole forest.
This state of affairs is insane, absurd, and ridiculous.
What’s really going on here? I know exactly: a psychological disorder, one I readily acknowledge in an equally psychologically disordered attempt to inoculate myself against such a disorder. I mean—how many people with a disorder acknowledge such overtly? Few to none. Just think of your own crazy uncle in the attic. Does he ever say to you as you deliver his morning fare, “I’m not really Napoleon talking nonsense inside Palais de Fontainebleu. I’m just your quirky uncle trying to have some fun at your expense. (Thanks for another delectable petite dejeuner.)” If I say I’m crazy, maybe I’m not.
Back to my cache of photos. Only when my phone turned into a snail and signaled that nearly all storage space had been consumed, did I buckle down and deal with 10,000 photos on the SD card and another 1,000 on the camera itself. My advice: maintain your file storage on a regular (automated) basis, not just when your phone becomes a snail. Otherwise, you’ll have nightmares filled with, “EMPTY TRASH.”
The better advice: don’t take so many photographs in the first place. The best advice: escape . . . ESCAPE! . . . the compulsion to stop time in its tracks. You’re fooling yourself. It can’t be done. Freeze-framing 30,000—or 30 million—moments in time is the grandest scheme of self-delusion ever devised.
Time to trade all my trouble for a Kodak box camera of the sort our grandmother used and only on the rarest occasions.
Now, as to my dad’s reams of writing . . . and my own > 100 journals written in encrypted cursive and > 50 GB’s worth of additional writing, stored here, there, everywhere. Now there’s a disorder!
Oops!
Just kidding; just trying to have some fun . . . at your expense, I mean, “amusement.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
1 Comment
Eric, I treasure posts about your dear father. He was an excellent records keeper by profession, and a true librarian (and musician and writer) in his heart. You are the only one I know who has inherited organized items from a deceased parent, allowing you to go back in chronological memory.
2021 Photo Project is my goal, with the same devices and intentions that challenge you. As a librarian, I knew what was spinning out of reach, but just couldn’t muster the time to manage it. I will check in with you at the end of this year. How are your photos?
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