projecting memories

 

My dad would lift me under the armpits, hoist me above his head so I could scramble onto the canal platform high above the deck of our boat. Then the same for my older brother. We’d find the gigantic wooden lever and push like vikings aboard a rowing ship, both of us, until it gave way to open the gates.

We’d watch as water burst through in streams, pressing against the expanding crack, filling the throughway. Mom and dad’s smiling faces rose above the wall and past our feet as the boat emerged from the crevice and we’d climb on board again. We meandered through northern England and Scotland this way, Easter break explorers.

Gliding under arched stone bridges hundreds of years old, so low we had to press ourselves to the deck to clear the underside of mossy rock. Along waterways lined with tall grasses and walking paths, generations of feet pressing the earth into a smooth, winding line for docking and towing and the stretching of legs. It was a rosy-cheeked adventure within an adventure, frosty mornings spent wrapped in fishermens’ knits and puffy jackets. British camping, it was, pastoral and gentle.

For a four-year-old with a mop, swabbing the decks is as close to heaven as you can get—second only, perhaps, to single-handedly operating a canal.

I say I’ll never forget that year we lived on a busy street in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Not cohesive remembering, but … well, like snapshots. But how much of that is me, and how much has been imprinted on my brain in the dark with a projection screen?

I adore slides. My mom and dad took thousands of of them, kept to this day in stacks of catalogued metal boxes at their house. Australia 1969. July-August 1979. Bedford 1987-88. Every few months we'd beg them to fill the Kodak carousel, unroll the soft, white screen, take us through another episode of our collective history.

Digital photography is all about blogs, flickr, unlimited gluttony. In a good way, but still—compared to the economy necessitated by film, does the digital medium dilute photography's magic with sheer volume? Can files on a laptop ever immerse our kids in vividness, saturate them with memory in the gloriously tactile way of slides and albums?

There’s nothing like a loaded carousel to tranform photographs into an occasion. For me, a pile of sharpie-marked CDs simply cannot compete.

What do you do to make the most of your family photography in the digital age? How will you keep your own adventures alive the way our parents used to, with dinner on fold-up TV tables in the cosy, flickering dark?

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The low-res scan of this slide (and of those on flickr) doesn't whatsoever do it justice. Apologies. All the photos are courtesy of my mom, who tells me she took them with an SLR in her hands for the first time. The drippy nose is courtesy of yours truly.

Comments

[meremortal]

such a beautiful story to accompany this lovely picture. pure nostalgia and childhood.
evan looks just like you in this photo, rosy cheeks, magic eyes, and all.
thank you for this glimpse of your travels.

[BrooklynGirl]

In answer to your question, I do digital scrapbooking to preserve my families photos now days. I think it is the way of the future for scrapbooking. And the nice thing is, if it gets destroyed, I can always reprint it. ;)

I really enjoy this blog! Thank you for sharing with us!

[Angella]

I force myself to DEVELOP photos at the end of each month.

I have but a single photo album that covers the first five years of my life.

My children each have one album that covers their first YEAR. And many more after that.

[krystyn]

I giggled aloud when I got to the part of your post that read "I adore slides." Many memories of my early childhood cannot be viewed without a slide projector. :)

[Sarah]

This is something that I have been struggling with actually. I have had my photos printed a few times and it was definitely worth it. I haven't put those into an album yet but I intend to. I would love some other ideas.

[Irene]

oh slides... I had totally forgotten about them!

I shoot film and take photos with my Polaroid cameras as often as possible. it is frustrating at times because you can't see the result immediately, but these little moments in my kids' life are captured and printed and to be cherished forever. AND I don't fret over hard disk backups!

[O]

I inherited all of my parents' slides, along with the projector & screen. I have fond memories of family get-togethers when we'd break out the same ol' slides (tons of them) and have an impromptu slide-show in the living room. I have 5 brothers & sisters and they all had children when I was little so back then it was amazing that ALL of us fit in my parents' tiny living room. It was fun though! I need to show the slides to my kids. The whir of the projector motor and the smell of the lightbulb when it got warm, along with all the fuzzies floating through the air that you could see in the light of the projected image...ah memories! I loved your story, btw. Now, for my family, I do have all my photos in chronological order and I make sure to at least date the envelopes of photos when I get them back from being developed. Now that I have digital cameras I'm trying to at least get them printed in a timely manner. (It's only been since Christmas).

[mel from freak parade]

I have recently discovered a new love - photobooks. I have gotten one from www.lulu.com and one from www.blurb.com. We have plans to make many more. We are going to do a kind of yearbook at the end of each year, as well as books for special occasions (vacations, birthdays, tae kwon do testing, fun school projects, whatever...). My kids love the idea of having a real book to flip through.

I also make digital slide shows (on DVD). Each one of my kids has their own, full of pictures of themselves from birth until now. They love watching themselves. I throw one of these together pretty frequently. Titles and music make it fun to watch....no, it's not as cool as getting out the screen and watching real slides, but it will have to do. :)

The pictures you shared are awesome. What great memories.

[divrchk]

The first time that I did any underwater photography was with a SLR and slide film. I really should figure out how to scan those in.

Each year, I do a photo book that covers the year. I'm not a scrapbooking person and really get no enjoyment from the creating process but once I have it in my hands, I'm thrilled with the end result. I'm in the process of doing one for 2007 via the free photobook from Shuttersisters and Snapfish. I always end up adding extra pages but it's so worth it.

[thordora]

I was thinking of that the other night, while thinking of Bon's post about her old photo albums....which reminded me to devlop more pictures. Just as I prefer reading the paper in my hands over the one online (despite the content being the same) the girls are much more enthralled with seeing themselves in books.

I wish I had my childhood documented like this. Will someone hurry up and invent a brain printer. :)

[Raven]

I scrapbook for each of my sisters/sisters-in-law every year of their children. At Christmas they all get a new page or two of pictures I have taken of their children that year. I always sneak in several pictures that they have never seen as a surprise and then when their children are fully grown they'll have a book (or several) to look back on.

For our family I do the same thing for our vacations together.

[maile]

There really IS so magical about slides. I love the transparency of them when they're projected, and even the nostalgic hum of the projector in the background. Makes me feel like having some developed.

Also, your writing as usual is so lovely. You paint pictures with words, as well as you do your camera. My favorite phrase is, "generations of feet pressing the earth" and "british camping was pastoral and gentle". I feel like I completely see it.
you are awesome.

[Stacy]

I scrapbook my kids' pictures. I don't do it often, but when I do, I print off some of my blogged stories of them and the pictures. I only pick the best shots to scrapbook, those that really tell the story of their lives.

[camerashymomma]

i'm a drawer digger. when i go back to visit my parents, i uncover cabinets and boxes full of old photos. i was the third child, and my mom was never one for photo albums. so, i cherish the photo treasures i find there in the unmarked shoeboxes. i've recently been having these same thoughts as you, i want to provide my son with the treasure hunt that i so love. i'm starting a box of scraps. i'm printing up photos to toss in there at will, to be shoved into a closet for a later date. these will be the true loves, beyond the perfectly framed wall photos or the scrapbook or the babybook. it'll be these take 2's that i hope he will learn to love, and through which he'll learn a little story of himself.

[Stasi]

Nothing beats a slide show after dinner. Unless your new Boyfriend is visiting and dad forgets to take out the bathtub shots. (i still think he used to do that on purpose)
This makes me want to pull out my old film camera, the one i inherited from my dad when i took my college courses in photography, he bought it to take pictures of me as a baby.

[corey]

Great post! Undoubtedly, your rich experiences as a child have played a part in your ability to write with such vivid detail.

I maybe have a handful of photos from my childhood. Maybe. The volume of photos grew when I was around ten, and got my own camera to take pictures (first a 110 camera, then disc film, then 35mm)...many of the images aren't great quality, but memories they captured are.

Now that I'm digital, I take thousands (literally...I can't help myself) of photos of my son and all our adventures with friends and family. I catalog them, by date, on my computer until I start to run out of space, and then burn them to DVDs and store them in binders.

Before I burn them to DVD, I select my favorites from each month and copy them into a "projects" folder to be used in a photo book for the year. I also do smaller photo books for gifts and special occasions (a special vacation, a friend's wedding, etc.). I've used Kodak Gallery for albums in the past, but am planning on using blurb.com for the larger year-end albums.

I must admit, I prefer digital to all the prints from my old cameras simply because I don't have the space to continue to store all those prints and negatives. And the photobooks are such a nice way to highlight and preserve the best shots. I also love that you can add text to the photobooks to provide more details about the story behind the photo. All too often I find very old family photos with no writing on the back and no one can remember the names of the people in the photos.

[Tracie]

I scrapbook all my pics and not digitally, in creative memories albums. I use kodak gallery and iphoto and play with my pics in photoshop, but nothing compares to holding an album and looking through it with my kids. Looking at them on a computer screen isn't even close, so I'll continue to print physical photos and scrapbook them.

[W. Lotus]

As a single person with no children and a biological family which is not close, I have not thought of memory preservation from that perspective. I usually think of it like, "What do I want other people who did not personally know me to know about my life after I am gone?" I also think about leaving behind a library of photographs which show the evolution of my abilities. The digital photos (and paper journal entries) I make are preserved with that in mind. Backing up pictures onto CD/DVD is quite good enough, provided I label the discs chronologically.

I used to be big on prints and photo albums, but since the ones I have just collect dust and take up space, I prefer electronic files, now.

[simply]

I don't know about you...but I try to put my pics right onto discs asap...I'm afraid of the ever glooming **CRASH** of the computer and loosing my pics forever :o(

I try to pick the best shots for photo albums and photo books.

~simply~

[Kizz]

Oh, Kate, I thought I was the only weird little North American kid whose family did this. We lived for a year in Newcastle when I was 6 (1976-77) and my parents fell in love with canal boating. When I was 13 my grandparents took the oldest 4 cousins on a canal boat trip and I was the official photographer with my Nikkormat, which I have only recently unearthed and begun to use again. We have carousels upon carousels of slides and I don't think we have a projector to watch them on. I'd love to load them up and go back there again.

These pictures are lovely.

[janet]

When I was growing up, slide shows were a regular occurence around my house. My dad keeps threatening to set up the big white screen and do another one for my kids. I wish he would.

[Megan]

You can still roll our the white screen and use a digital projector with your digi pictures. After all, wasn't it more the ritual of the set up, the time spent, seeing your pictures that big. I remember...

But you can still do it all, just now you slip a memory card or a cd into the projector instead of a sleeve of slides..

I just found you... love your photos

[christel]

I also struggle with this. My intentions are to scrapbook my digital pictures but right now they sit on a bunch of CD's and my hard drive. I've started a scrapbook for my youngest and I've completed up to her ninth month and she's five. That tells you how far behind I am.

[Paige]

I always forget to get pictures printed and then when I think about it I get overwhelmed with the thought of printing 2 years worth of pictures. BUT, Kodak recently had a deal where you could get 150 prints for $15, so I started there. I just started putting them in an album last night. I like to buy the albums that have a few lines next to the picture so I can write the date and what was happening. So I am caught up to about a year ago. Now I just have one more year to print and put in albums.

[leigh]

I think the idea of putting them on a dvd as a movie is the closest thing to the old slide show feeling that we in this digital age will get. We've done this for my parents 50th wedding aniversary last summer and they loved it.

[Jo]

Beautiful picture and post, Kate. I see so much of your oldest boy in this expression. Priceless to compare. And now I understand where your love of the sea comes from. Indeed, it's been ingrained in you. On photos: I agree with you. My parents had a good old Kodak Polaroid camera and their albums, which consist of construction paper catalogs of Polaroids carefully taped to the orange and brown and black sheets, floor me. I love them so much. Our computer age indeed takes away from these relics. So I print photos often, and update them in frames around the house; I have journals for each of my kids which contain favorite photos taken every few months; I go to the drugstore and have the best of the best of our shots printed at least once a year. I save them in photo boxes. I even do the Shutterfly photo albums once a year to create a story around a few treasured ones. Hopefully these things will keep the reality of photographs tangible, rather than just catalogs of imagines by year in 'My Documents.' Great post, as always -

[Lauri]

we didn't have slides in my family...but we each had 2 albums that Mom diligently assembled hours and hours at a time. My brother and I (and now my children) poured over those albums time and time again!

The age of the computer and digital pics...have a charm all their own which the photo album of days gone by can not caputre ... the slide show screen saver. I have more than 4000 pics on my main server here at the house and every computer in the house shows different slide shows when not in use! The kids, family and friends can often be found just watching the images that tell the ongoing saga of our life ... over and over and over again!
Thanks for such a wonderful post - what beautiful qualities in your writing!

[mb]

you are so dang cute.

i bought an digital SLR to learn how to take manual photos...i was going broke with the learning curve with my film slr. vinyl-- which is my first choice in listening enjoyment--actually captures more sound and space, and i think the same way with film.it captures each milli-moment in the grains. but i'm a simple girl and computers make my eyes hurt.:-)

[cjh]

I have recently developed a love for photo books you can make on online photo websites. I like something tangible. And I think Evan looks just like you here...I knew it was you just because I saw him in you.