Snaps

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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What do you do with your pictures, your personal pictures? Your professional pictures will be archived to some extent by the people who paid for them and may well continue to have a long life after they were taken. But what about the pictures you took for yourself, be they family snaps or great art?

Since it’s pretty easy to pass great art on to museums, especially if you don’t charge for it, our primary concern is family snaps. I’ve mentioned before that I inherited many of my family’s photo albums, fairly large collections of relatively small drug store prints. They are a loving collection of memories, but limited by the quality and size of the prints. Rather than albums, the family snaps I take are larger loose prints that fill archival portfolio boxes, 8x10 and 8 1/2 x 11. Like an album, you can put them in your lap or on a desk or table and browse. But, for me, that bigger and hopefully better print stirs stronger memories, stronger feelings. Hopefully it does that for the other folks who see them.

Why not images on a computer screen? I think on the family snapshot level emailing a few jpgs is wonderful. I think sitting someone down with a box of prints is more powerful. But, more important, a box of prints looks like a box of prints. An auxiliary hard disc looks like a metal box with input and output sockets. When it’s time for the next generation to inherit the family snaps, there’s a real chance the metal box will not be recognized for what it is and get dumped. And, if it doesn’t, remember the magnetic signal on that disc will decay considerably faster than well made prints in a box.

So - what are you doing, what do you plan to do with your family snaps?
 
Numerous times on another forum I described the advantages of “the prints in a shoebox” versus having photos only on disk or on USB memory sticks. With the prints in a box, all you need to do is open it and look to see the photos. In addition to my albums, I have family photos over 100 years old in shoeboxes.

In this vaguely similar thread,

https://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173696

I came to the conclusion that making inexpensive (?) photo books might be a good way to tell a story or otherwise provide some organization with such photos.

Not too long ago, I remember a friend lamenting that her daughter doesn’t have a Baby Book or any tangible photos from childhood - all their photos exist (for now) on Facebook or wherever, but 40, 50 years from now... what will exist for them to look back on?
 
Between my partner and I we have family scattered across three continents, so the shoe box thing doesn’t work well. For us it’s just a shared album on Photos.
 
My daughter complained that we did not have a photo album when she was young.
Naturally I have hundreds of prints, colour and my B&W prints. So for her 40th Birthday during lockdown I made an old fashioned album of her from Day 1 until high school.
A secret present which she loves and her children , 5 and 3 think it is strange that Mummy looked like a baby once.
I have the makings for our son too but her has worked that out by now.
We did a poster board of his early photos for his 21 st birthday ( some slightly embarrassing ) but his friends and peers loved it.
Philip
 
We inherited several albums and boxes of photos from our parents at their passings. The problem is, photos not in albums are often unlabeled making it impossible for the next generation (us) to identify who some of the people are. Who is that kid in a sepia photo of 100 years ago? Grandma? Aunt Bessie? Or the neighbor? In addition, even in albums, many of the photos are not of good quality - does the world needed another poorly exposed, out of focus or shakey photo of the Eiffel Tower? Do we toss those or keep them? Make a digital file of only the recognizable people or of everybody? These are the questions that have lead to our inertia.
 
I'd say photo albums would be preferable but when I see my teenaged daughter growing up, I'm not so sure. Her world is digital and online. The cloud, perhaps, or, at least both. Cheers, OtL
 
It's all a mish-mash of prints in archival photo and photo paper boxes, 6 hard drives and several boxes of 35mm, 6x6, 6x4.5 and 4x5 negatives and transparencies.
 
Pretty much everything you said Bill. We got boxes of prints, albums of prints, and images on disks. I must say though, our kids and their friends, Generation Z, consumes everything electronically it seems. If they can't get it on their phone, they're not interested in looking at it. Having a batch of high school and college graduations right now, and all the images circulating amongst proud parents and the graduates themselves are all on cell phones.

Maybe the over abundance of imagery that Millennials and Gen Z are exposed to every day will make the images from our past less important to them. I hope not, but I fear it may.

Best,
-Tim
 
Here is a site that can give you print permanence figures for a variety of digitally printed photos in black-and-white and color, even silver halide mini labs, plus general information about the care and preservation of a collection of photos. Actually, I think this is the number one site for this information. Henry Wilhelm’s interest in image permanence started when he was a photographer. Today he is helping his fellow photographers and others from museums to the movie industry and is pretty much acknowledged as one of the leaders, perhaps the leader, in the field.

http://www.wilhelm-research.com
 
I inherited a couple boxes of framed and unframed old family photos. Many are aged or degraded. Are there services or good ways of "restoring" these photo prints and archiving in digital?
 
When my mom passed almost seven years ago I collected all sorts of stuff she had through out the house, figuring my dad wasn't too interested in going through it all and concerned he would throw away most of it.
There were several photos of her parents on their wedding day (both her parents died when she was very young) that I'd never seen. One of her sisters had asked if I'd found any of these.
I scanned the images and have them, the original prints I gave to my aunt. Those were her parents and the photos would have more meaning to her...I'll let her kids figure out what to do with them when the time comes.
As far as our kids are concerned they will have boxes of old prints to go through, I'll let them figure out which ones to keep...occasionally, I've been giving their significant others some old fun and sometimes embarassing photos of our kids...
 
I have thousands of digital photos and scanned film images, but I'll freely admit probably not that many of them are any good in the artistic sense of the word. I really should go through what I've shot and create some themed photo books, some large prints for the ones worth hanging, then dump the rest (or at least not worry about what happens to them).
 
I recall seeing two photos of myself ever as a child - one a baby picture with the full frontal nudity and one as a six year old in a jacket and slacks. I don’t recall seeing photos of my siblings either. So when my children was born I took a lot of photos and accumulated enough color negatives to fill three large storage bins. Apparently I over did it because my kids ended up hating it, hating to sit for it, to be still and then had to look at the prints. I have turned them off photography completely. When we moved we just saved a few and discarded the rest. No one in my house care about the photos. For my own personal photography the street photography, the Rolleiflex street portraits, the large format field work, I keep those for myself and never show them to family and friends. When I do scan a few,(now shooting Monochrom), I post them in photo sites. I posted about 10% in Flickr. When I get to it I’ll do some serious editing and do a self print book.
 
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