My dad loves to take pictures. Every time the family gathered together for a birthday, a lunch or a daytrip, he forced us to pose for some pictures. Endless posing between an aunt and a sister, wishing he would just stop asking us to smile. The bad thing is that those pictures portrait our most innatural grins. The good thing is that, the day we’ll find those films (because he never printed the pics afterwards) we’ll have a little memory treasure.
On the other hand, he printed all the pictures of our childhood. Some of them are blurred or simply catch sensless angles of bodies, waving hair, hands, running legs, closed eyes. The thing is, sometimes an imperfect pictures is all we have left of a moment of our life. Just that one, out of focus, picture. But isn’t it amazing how well it does trigger our memories? Just like a perfume, an image can take you back in time. Maybe it’s the shape of those bodies, or the way the light is hitting the floor. An object on a table, or even just the colors of that picture.
Today I use two hard disks to save the (tons of) photos I take. I only printed three photobooks in more than ten years and I’ve lost some of the pictures of my 20s because of a computer damage. I have dozens of Albums on my Facebook page but just one actually printed photo album on my shelves, that holds the delicious smell of inks and photo paper.
Today, I seek perfection in the pics I take. The right light, the right expression, the right place and time. I select among five or six pics of the same moment, the blurred ones are deleted. Since I am an Instagram maniac, my pics witness almost every moment of my life. Still, my family memories is a link. It’s like… not real.
I’m trying to print a bit more. I have less space for photo albums but I want to hang some of the pictures. See them out of the screen, touch them. Put them in a box for Viola, like a little memory treasure.
So, all this post to ask you: how do you deal with the photo storage? Do you print them? Do you make albums or photobooks? Do you just fill tons of hard disks? I am very curios, and I am also trying to figure out what to do with my Terabytes of pictures…
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