Old photos

While I was in San Francisco I tackled a project that Dad has been wishing someone would do for years: the ten shoeboxes of photos under the table in the dining room. His main priority was for someone to throw away the junk and the duplicates, and label the ones worth keeping. Scanning and/or albums could come later, if ever.

I have been avoiding this task for years myself, but this year, I thought, why not. (Even before the diagnosis.) It turned out to be sort of fun and sociable, and it went much faster than I had thought. I sat in the living room, sorting and labeling, and occasionally asking “Who is this lady with the big glasses?” or “What restaurant is this?”

Identifying people in the photos was mostly very easy because almost all of the photos were of the same couple dozen people. Mom, Dad, me, Dale; Dad’s sister, Dad’s mom and her second husband, and Mom and Dad’s two best friends; and Mom’s mom, brothers and sisters-in-law, and their kids. At first, I was careful to label every photo with each person’s full name, but by the time I got to box #3 I decided this was overkill.

Dating the photos was also mostly easy because almost all the photos were from the 1990s. I guess after that, we all went digital. I’m not sure why there weren’t any from earlier; maybe Mom had sorted all those already. I am sure she generated the shoeboxes. Her handwriting was everywhere: she made notes about sending copies of certain photos to certain people, and sometimes (lucky day!) wrote the year or other identifying information on the photo envelope. Dad was never much of a photo-printer in my recollection.

While I worked I thought about how much casual photography has changed in the last twenty years. Back then, we really only took pictures of special occasions, because most of the time no one had a camera. Now we always have a camera. Back then, we had to finish the roll before we sent it in to be developed, so there would be 20 pictures of some family event and then 4 pictures randomly taken around the house. Now there are no “rolls” of “film.” The most exciting anachronism was the slides. We didn’t even have a way to view them. A visiting friend brought over a Kodak Model 1 projector, no fan or carousel or anything, just stick each slide into the slot. When we were done we had let the projector cool off for half an hour before we could touch it.

There were at least two things that made this fun, besides contemplating the march of technology. The first was that I threw a ton of junk away, which was liberating and satisfying:

• Negatives. If I want to copy a picture now I will scan it.
• Impersonal photos. Cityscapes, monuments, pretty trees: turns out they mean nothing in an old photo, at least not in our family. None of us cares about a picture of Mount Whatsit, and if we did, we could get a better one in two seconds. Maybe this is why people take selfies now, to personalize otherwise boring or touristy photos.
• Bad photos. Oh my goodness the bad photos. Blurry, crooked, backlit, distant, over- and under-exposed, half full of someone’s elbow. Maybe someone pulled the good photos out of the envelope and put them in an album, leaving only the crap. Or maybe it’s that back then we didn’t get to see the photo until it was developed, so we didn’t realize.
• Duplicates: Remember at something like a wedding you were supposed to send each person a packet of photos appropriate to them, including both the highlights of the event itself, and any cute pictures of the recipient or their loved ones? What a gigantic pain in the neck that must have been. Here’s to progress.

The second thing that made it fun is that I found some fun treasures. There were pictures of houses I’ve lived in (in college, or when I was teaching at Evergreen) that took my breath away, because I had forgotten what it was like to live there, and hadn’t known there were photos. There were pictures of my parents and their friends in their living room, reminding me of how Pam (now deceased) used to sprawl on the floor and eat potato chips off a napkin, and my mom (also deceased) used to sit in a back corner so she had room to stretch. Am I taking the pictures now that will capture these moments for my kids? Can I even know what those would be?

In another category of treasures, look at this amazing photo of my mother and her brothers. This would have been something like 1943, on her family’s farm in western Massachusetts. The family still owns the same property.

Here is a beautiful mystery photo of some of my ancestors on their wedding day.

And here is a photo that was not previously in our collection, contributed by a friend who came to visit. This is me with her daughter - I'm the one with the bangs.