We took a trip out to my grandparents’ place this weekend (Grandma passed away in January and Grandpa had passed away 1.5 years prior) and came home with yet another trunk full of photos. My family was apparently a bunch of shutterbugs, and that love of cameras and photography was definitely passed down to me as well. This batch is mostly from 1945 and upwards, taken mostly by grandpa. I decided to scan all of them into the computer so that, should anyone want a photo, I can pull up the digital file (if the original was distributed to someone else) and forward that along.
Grandpa and (Step)Grandma never had children together, but they did have lots and lots of furbabies – cats and dogs. I started the scanning effort with the huge batch of polaroid photographs (ranging from 1967 to 1996). Most of these photos are of their cats and dogs, a few of eachother, two vacations, home improvement progress, and a couple of various family members. There are some adorable consistencies – an annual photo of my grandfather with a cake grandma made for him on his birthday, the yearly Christmas tree, etc. I sat here, scanning through the photos, thinking, “Well now, why did they take photos of this stuff?” Then I realized what sort of photos are on my cell phone, and put that thought to rest. Husband and I have no children (with no plans for any), so while we might have more vacation photos, the distribution beyond that is about the same. Dog, dogs, new patio, dogs, dogs, painting the living room, dogs, dogs, flowers in the garden, and so on.
Something else to think about too, is that we have all these wonderful photos from my grandparents to look back on, and 50 years from now, what will we be looking at? I can’t say I’ve actually printed a photo of mine (outside of photography jobs) in years. Will the digital files survive like these polaroids have? Will we be picking through SD cards and hard drives and flickr streams to see photos of family members or will they be lost to hard drive crashes? It makes me wonder if I should be printing up more, assembling small printed albums of yearly highlights, or doing something creative like creating throw pillows from custom SpoonFlower fabric of our travels. Lots of things to think about! Here are a couple of my favorites from the batch of polaroids.
I sometimes think / ponder that having small photo albums with a theme might be nice – like, if I ever have kids, I’m sure many, many digital pictures will be taken, but once a year (or so, perhaps around a birthday), have small photo albums printed up for immediate family (grandparents, for example).
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