Family photos are often cited as being the possessions that people would most
want to save from a house fire. Why do you think that photographs are such a
significant part of our lives?
There are certain moments of our lives that matter the most to each one of us: joyful birthdays, wedding days, christenings, holidays; the list goes on and on. The most convenient way to capture joyful or sad moments is with a photographic camera. As mentioned before, a photo acts like a time capsule, a glimpse of the past. When we look at the photos we can’t help ourselves but think about these special moments, consider the circumstances taken, and feel nostalgic, happy, and unhappy, laugh, cry or frown depending on what each photo means to us. So holding pictures of our past signifies our history, our unique passage on this planet, and can be part of our identity, part of who we are. That’s why people value them so much and as mentioned in the brief are cited as the possessions that people would want to save from a house fire. They are our legacy, our fingerprint.
Write down how you feel about photos – or videos – from your family’s past.
As it happens with everybody, I feel very engaged when I look at my family
photos or videos. It is a lot of fun to flick into the pictures remembering all
the good times spent with all these adorable people of mine.
It is also more than cathartic to look at them; feels like redemption, a way out, a litany of
the past.
It is about members of my family that are not with us anymore; I can’t help
myself not to look at the photo of my late mother standing there on the
cupboard, holding my beloved baby son who is 14 now.
All these pictures of my youth, my marriage, my children, my parents, my
family! People who shaped me and made me the person I am, coming alive out of
all these sporadically taken photos which might be meant nothing the moment they were taken but they mean so much to me now.
My family is in colour pictures: they are my unique moments.
It is my past.
It is my legacy.
Will this archiving be affected by the digital revolution? Do you have images languishing on
your hard drive that you keep meaning to process? Is flicking through images on someone’s
phone or digital photo frame as potent as looking through an album or sorting through a box
of photos? Or is it better?
As with many features of our daily life, photography has been affected by the digital revolution. Photos are now high definition, are digitally processed with filters of all sorts, and then saved onto our computer’s hard drive, in our smartphone’s enlarged memory, or even onto a cloud. So, there are many options for rescuing pictures today whereas in the past the photographs were captured on a film which (if this was not destroyed for some reason) then had to be developed, and then most often the bodies of photographs were bad quality as the camera user wasn’t able to see what was capturing. The rest, depending on the user, were either stored in a box to be completely forgotten or ( and that is the best option) they were filed down into a photo album for people to see. As anyone would suggest, the digital revolution has updated photography and has given a better meaning to the whole experience: from the camera user to the filer, up to the random viewer. So, even though it is quite interesting to go through a photo album digital photography is a lot more convenient, gives a better user experience, and it is so much easier to store, process and file.
At the end of the day, having digital form photos does not prevent anyone to print any favourite pictures and create a photo album: the new technology is flexible and is embracing all the practises of the past.
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