Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Photos, Photos Everywhere
Last week, the same day that my newsletter on our historic attachment to paper, was posted, I heard a great piece on the radio about our new issues with our photo archives.
Much like the printed word, new technology has made it much cheaper to take and print pictures. I remember in my post-collegiate days having to save up to print a few rolls of film. Now, it’s instant and practically free. Worse, our cell phones are equipped with great cameras and we always have them with us, so we take more pictures—and fewer of them are truly terrible.
You might think all of this would make us less attached to pictures—after all, they are cheap and plentiful—but it seems instead we are living in an increasingly visual society, and the pictures we post on social media have become a kind of currency.
In the piece I heard on the radio, Alan Henry, who is the deputy editor of LifeHacker, gave the same advice I always give. First, he said, you have to decide why you are keeping photos. What scenarios are you going to view them in? Are they for you or your children? You can’t really decide whether you want to “go deep,” as he puts it, until you know the reason you are keeping them in the first place.
It is hard to delete photos. Even for me. I don’t know about you, but I think my kids are cute even in bad pictures. In fact, sometimes those are the very best. For a few years I felt very guilty. I would dutifully photograph the table before the birthday party with the frosted birthday cake, but once the doorbell rang I would largely forget to take pictures. I was too busy pinning tails, lighting candles, painting faces.
Now that my children are 10 and 15, I realize that it’s a blessing that I don’t have too many photos. I want my photo archive to be the “greatest hits”: “She turned 10, I made a cake; we went to the beach, there were waves and we were smiling.” Even just a few photos for every event add up over time.
Maybe I sound curmudgeonly, but I believe that even if I don’t photograph it and post it on Facebook, stuff still happens. Or to take a more Buddhist tack, Thich Nhat Hanh might say that I experience the birthday party more if I am in it, rather than photographing it.
Check out the radio story, and by all means get your photos in order. But in the same spirit that I urge you to shop less, try to reach for your camera less, and enjoy each moment more.