On printing photos
I've lost the majority of photos from my adolescence. I was a teen when the smartphone era began. My photos from my childhood, however, are safe and sound, on a photo album in my parent's house. They took picture on film cameras, at first, developing the photos whenever the rolls were full. Later, they started using digital cameras. But they still developed the SD cards when they were full, out of habit, and out of suspicion for computers.
I took a lot of photos during my high school years. Some on digital cameras, which I irregularly backed up on my laptop. Mostly on my phone, though, never backing them up anywhere. I thought they would be safe, my phone and laptop are always around, right? If I got a new one I could just transfer the pictures from the old to the new. But, as time went on, I procrastinated doing it. Or I forgot to do it. Or I even formatted my laptop, having forgotten that some pictures were only in that drive.
In my digital storage today I see a gap between specific years, marking years lost due to digital media's tendency to vanish from my mind. I forget to backup, because I forget it exists. Which is also why I very rarely look at them again. They just sit in a drive, on a random folder which I rarely open. Even after learning backup diligence, regularly transferring photos from my phone to my laptop and external SDD, I only dumped them in that folder and forgot to actually cherish them. That's the value of physical media. It exists as an object in our world. It takes up space, it demands attention.
I started to print my photos around 2019, precisely because I was worried about this tendency in me. I now organize my digital photos regularly and curate those that mean the most. I then print them in a local printing shop, like our parents did.I shop around, patiently, for a cool photo album (they've become rare and expensive since the rise of social media). I pick carefully, with intent, where each photo will stay in the narrative of this album, writing something about its context on the backside. Finally, I add the album to my bookshelf in my living room. It sits there, in plain sight. Sometimes friends will visit, and I will show them the photos I took in my latest trip. Or we will reminisce on shared moments, prodded back to life through these physical memories.
Sometimes, I look to that bookshelf and I glimpse spine of the photo album, and I'm compelled to revisit those photos. It's not forgotten, not hidden. They wait to beckon me to visit them, once in a while.
^This post is part of Agora Road's Travelogue