I can’t be the only person who takes photos on their phone only to forget they exist and never see them again. My family used to print off photos every year and make them into an album. Growing up, I remember going through the albums a lot, if I was bored or if I wanted to relive the holidays. When my sister and I got our own devices, we stopped doing that. In fact, we stopped taking photos and saving them with the family photos altogether.
While on holidays earlier this year, I decided to try something different. For three weeks I put away my phone for photography and only used my old camera with a 50mm lens. I was just rediscovering this camera after a few years of not using it and I wanted an excuse to take photos with it.
The idea didn’t just spring from nowhere. It came following a dinner where an old photo album was produced and we flicked through the several decade old photos, admiring the photos and looking for family resemblances. It struck me that these photos, taken over 40 years ago, were still being looked at today and made me realise that we are losing our memories by keeping them solely on our phones, cloud services or hard drives.
So the phone went away, and my camera was my constant companion for three weeks. I began to feel excited about taking pictures, a feeling I haven’t felt with photography for some time. I really enjoyed the editing process, and played around with colours to make them look like they were from a film camera.
The photos I took were different. They consisted of small moments and memories. Some of them were in styles that I wouldn’t think to take normally, and have opened my eyes to new types of photography. I also got excited to edit and pick them for printing, which I did at my local photo shop.
But why is it so important?
In an age of social media, it sometimes feels like we’ve all gone a bit crazy over other people’s opinions of our lives. Are we being ‘cool’ enough? Are our holiday snaps ‘vibey’ enough? We need to remember that it’s also important to make art and take photos for ourselves, and ourselves alone. Printing off some holiday snaps and sharing them in physical form with friends and family can be far more gratifying than sharing them on social media.
Secondly, digital files are vulnerable to erasure, phones being lost, broken or stolen, computer malfunction, or cloud services going down. Sure, physical prints aren’t necessarily the most secure form either, but they provide more certainty that your photos are safe and that they exist. I speak from the experience of having lost entire folders of photos because my laptop just decided to get rid of them.
Also, digital photos get old and fade away into our distant memories on dusty hard drives and computers. However, I can almost guarantee that the family albums in your attic are still intact and still get spread across the dinner table on family occasions. Physical photos can last for quite a few generations longer than digital files and can turn into rich historical family documents.
So I printed my photos and spent a happy afternoon laying out the photos in a scrapbook. It’s not artsy, it’s not full of sparkles or glitter. It’s simple but it’s my memories from the holiday. And in a few years, I know I’ll be glad to have it to look back at and remember the times, hopefully with a few more scrapbooks with memories.
I set you a challenge to do the same at the next holiday or family occasion. Set your own limits, such as only using a disposable camera, or limiting yourself to 100 photos a week. See where it leads you. Experiment. And remember, it’s yours, there is no wrong answer.
