Preserve Your Memories, They're All That's Left You

Photograph:  an image of an object, person,scene, etc, in the form of a print or slide recorded by a camera on photosensitive material

While I was In Moab over Memorial Day, 83 year old Aunt Jean was passing around an old photograph of a car out in the desert, with a young man standing next to it. Judging by the car the image was probably taken in the late thirties or early forties. She was passing it around to see if anyone could remember who exactly it was in the picture, and why the subject was out in the desert. I thought of how sad it was that the information has been lost, and how years later we have to pass around the photo to see if anyone knows anything about it. (No one did by the way...) But then I got to thinking about my own practices when it comes to the distribution of my own  images, and realized that even though I have Flickr pages, and Facebook, and all sorts of Digital Electric image files, I actually don't have a lot of PHOTOGRAPHS. If by fate, the music were to stop and my Dance with Death was to end tomorrow, what would happen? I have thousands of electronic images, but there aren't very many actually printed onto paper PHOTOGRAPHS to hold in your hand and talk with relatives about in 50 years from now. So despite all the technology to preserve photographic images, maybe we have actually gone the other way, by actually stopping to produce photographs. This troubles me somewhat. Mainly because I realize that while I love taking pictures and making images, I do not care much for actual photographs. They are expensive to print. They take up a lot of space in my house. They are extremely flammable. Scrapbooking with paper is an expensive, time consuming, pain in the butt. So now I am in a bit of a quandary. I cannot stop creating images. I am addicted and I love it, and I will not stop, but I hate printing photographs to gather dust and sit around my house. I am afraid that all of these electronic images will disappear into the ether of cyber space when I cack out, which kind of defeats the reason I take images in the first place. So what to do?

For now my plans are to do the following:

1. Make sure all of my image files are backed up onto CD-ROM with complete labels of each image (for example the file name of the above image could be Jenna Eliason Deadhorse Point 5-25-2012. This process will take a bit of time, because like I said, I have A LOT of images.

2. Complete and actually print the "photobooks" that I have started, remembering to label each page with correct names and dates, so even though it won't be a photograph of each image, there can be an actual printed book to hold in your hand to point out and laugh about how the clothes and hair styles are so out of date.

3. Make a list of all the photographic websites that I use, such as Flickr, and the passwords for each site, so if I do check out tomorrow someone can have access to my accounts and retrieve the electronic files if they are needed.

I would love to hear your opinions on the matter. What do you do with all of the images you create? Leave me a note!