How an old photo led to my writing a book, but how many family photographs will survive our digital age?
Some years ago, during a visit I made to
my mother in Melbourne, Australia, we found a box of old photographs on top of a wardrobe.
It was a goldmine of family memories, but not without its problems. The colour
prints were mostly faded, and while the black-and-white and sepia photos were
generally in good condition, almost none bore any identification.
We spent hours working our way through
the photographs, using a soft pencil to write names, and where possible,
locations and approximate dates on the back of each one.
As we worked our way through the
collection, my eye was caught by a family group photograph taken in a studio in
Melbourne in 1914 around the time the First World War was getting underway. The
group included a woman I had never seen before.
My mother, who has since died,
identified the woman as my Great Aunt Florence “Florrie” Cox, and under my
cross-examination, she very reluctantly revealed that Florrie had been a
Baptist missionary in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and had innocently been
caught up in a terrible scandal that had shamed the family in Melbourne.
I had originally thought this would be a
marginal family history episode, but the more I learned the more I realised
that I had a book in the making. This was published as God’s Triangle. Had my mother not had such a clear long-term
memory, that old photograph would not have been identified and the fascinating
and touching story of God’s Triangle
would have remained untold.
There was a time, not that many decades
ago, when taking a photograph was an event from which the results were
treasured. Families would have a Kodak Box Brownie or maybe, as I did, a clunky
East German Praktica 35mm. Most of the photos would be in black-and-white or
sepia, although with the growth of 35mm cameras, a treat would be to buy a roll
of Kodachrome colour transparency film.
Special events, such as weddings and the
birth of a child in the family, would occasion the services of a professional
photographer or perhaps a visit to a photographic studio with its massive
lights and camera. The photographs from these sessions were archival quality and
became proud possessions to be passed on from generation to generation.
The rot began to set in when cheap
cameras, 35mm colour print film and one-hour processing began to dominate the
market in the 1970s and 1980s. Colour photographs became the norm and began to
lose their value as a means of permanently recording our lives pictorially.
Extra prints were sometimes ordered for
friends, then the negatives would probably be binned. Worse – and this is
something few people realised – these colour prints were prone to discolouring
and fading and had little or no long-term archival quality.
It is safe to estimate that billions of
digital photographs are now taken around the world each day, the majority of
them on smart phones, but how many will survive to take their place in a
family’s historical record? Almost none.
Some of these photographic efforts end
up being emailed to friends and family, or are posted on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Flickr and other social media outlets, but are very rarely turned
into prints that can be held in the hand and admired, or put in a frame or even
a photographic album.
The irony is that the technical quality
of the pictures taken on digital cameras and smart phones is exceptionally high,
but not by the time they are transferred to the social media. They may look
good on a computer screen, but they can’t be printed in good quality.
From time to time, I get interesting family
photographs emailed to me, or they are posted on Facebook, and I ask for
high-definition copies so that I can produce good quality prints and add them
to my family history archive. I rarely get them, either because they have been
deleted, or the photographers can’t figure out how to process them in top
quality.
A friend of mine fires off the camera in
his iPhone at every opportunity, but when I ask him what happens to all the
pictures, the short answer is that they are mostly lost whenever he upgrades
his mobile phone or computer, something that he does quite frequently.
This takes me onto another bugbear:
identification of photographs. Almost since photography was popularised by the
likes of Fox Talbot and George Eastman, there has been a failure to identify
the who, the where and the when on a photograph.
It is sometimes a tedious task, but all
my saved photographs are identified, usually with a caption added when I process
them through my Photoshop, or similar, software. This often prompted ridicule on the part
of my family and friends, but I am delighted to report that I am gradually
winning them over.
Initially, when I showed a photo with a name, location
and date on it, I would be told “But we know all that!” My answer is “Well, you know that now,
but I bet you won’t remember the date in a matter of months. You will be a bit
hazy about the location in a few years, and a few years after that you won’t be
entirely sure who all the people are. This has proved to be true in many cases.
While I fear for the future of our family
photographic history, new and cheap printing opportunities have emerged in
recent years as a benefit of digitisation. It is now possible with fairly basic
computer skills to design a photobook that can be printed by a commercial
company for as little as £10, although £40 is a reasonable expectation for
larger books with hard covers.
Photobooks have an advantage over the
old photographic albums in that the photos do not become unstuck and fall out
over time. So, while I fret that so much of our pictorial history is being
lost, never to be recovered, it is not all depressing news.
