An Avalanche of Photographs

I want to talk about photographs--the unsorted and unidentified photos that sit in boxes on the high shelves in my office. Each box holds records of family gatherings. The happy moments of our children's weddings, for example, or photographs of family members around our dining room table—sometimes happy faces, sometimes faces that are smiling but noticeably unhappy beneath the smile. Quick snaps of unprepared people with closed eyes. Posed photos that look posed. Plus innumerable shots of nature: close-ups of tulips, panoramic views of an unidentifiable mountain range or a featureless prairie. And nary a name or a date on any of them.

 

A couple of years ago I culled a lot of the nature photos and put them in the crafts room to be cannibalized. I use them to make greeting cards—sometimes stamping out a tree-colored or flowered-bedecked moose with a moose punch (can you imagine what a moose punch tastes like?). Then I insert one of those punched-out mooses (meese?) into some other landscape photo. In this way I will, over the next ten or fifteen years of making greeting cards, eventually get rid of the hundreds of pictures of places I've been but can't remember. Is this a shot of the Rio Grande around the Pojaque Valley when Coleman lived there? Is this a picture of that state park outside Syracuse? Is this a picture of the narrow end of my friend Anne's lake? Who knows? But I've found that all nature photographs benefit from the addition of a moose to a path or a cliff or a pond.

 

So this will use up some of the nature photos. But what about the hundreds of candid shots of people I know and love? What to save? What to pitch? Save them all just as they are, in unmarked boxes, and let someone else deal with them when I'm gone? Or organize them (oh, no!) into albums, painstakingly adding to each one the names of the subjects and an approximate date? Now there's a project for a long snowy winter. A long, long snowy winter. All winter. No reading. No needlepoint. Just night after night of "Who's this?" or "Do I have to list every single person in this picture?" or "Was this in 1980 or in 1993?" Oh my!

 

Photographs. And now I have a digital camera, whose manual I must read so that I can figure out how to take—oh, joy!—more pictures. What's wrong with this picture?

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com