Our digital cameras are taking our remembered lives away
- March 22, 2010
- 1 comments
- Posted in Family, Latest Posts
On my wall, I have a photograph of my grandmother at 12, with her parents and siblings. They’re done up in silk dresses, handsomely arranged on chairs, unsmiling, with a confident papa strutting behind.
It’s one of my treasures. I have thousands of other family photographs in boxes, some as recent as five years ago, others dating back more than 100 years. But our remembered family has reached its end. Everything is digitized now, which means that future generations will never have a picture like mine to frame.
For all our modernity, we don’t know how to keep digitized photographs alive. Snapshots, to use an old-fashioned word, might yellow or even fade, if they’re not on good paper, but it takes a century for them to crumble (if they ever do) and copies of favorites are easily made. By contrast, the 0s and 1s of our digitized images degrade in just a few years. Even if you keep burning and reburning disks, technology will eventually outfox you. Your old disks won’t fit in the new machines.
Some day, an interested great-grandchild might find my paper photos in a box in an attic and thumb through them, laughing at our queer clothes and the odd look of our cars. But what if all I have in the attic is a hard drive? No machine will be able to read it. As of this decade,visible family history is dribbling away.
It’s not just photographs. I have letters from my late husband, written to his mother when he was an 18-year-old pilot in World War II. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the warriors email and text. Unless their spouses and partners print the emails out, no young child will ever know that piece of a parent’s life.
Libraries are trying to figure out how to preserve digital material, some of which already can’t be read on the technology of today. While they’re thinking about it, they keep the disks and hard drives in climate-controlled rooms, hovered over by computer savvy archivists.
Those are definitely not the conditions in my atticI
I keep meaning to get photo paper and print a sampling of pictures that show how we live now. But frankly, I’m busy and it takes a lot of time. If I could only drop my disks off at a drugstore and have prints back in an hour, fitted neatly into yellow envelopes….
What will families do when they’ve lost their pictorial and graphic history? Maybe they won’t care. What’s the point of hanging up your great-grandmother, anyway, and what does it matter what your mother looked like when she was 12?
At this point, everyone alive is vanishing and we aren’t even thinking about it. Because disks and hard drives don’t last, you’re losing the pictures of yourself at your current age. Parents are losing the pictures of their children when they were young. Without these records, you can’t look back and remember yourself. It will be a loss.
Tags: family history, photographs
Print the photos. Start writing letters again. Memory is ALL we have. Thanks, Jane, for these thoughtful obvservations.