Old Photos

When I was a kid, my parents and grandparents would often give me a family lesson by showing me boxes of old photos. “This is my great uncle John; he’s my mother’s uncle from the Taylor side. You know, they were the ones that moved from the country before I was born. Doesn’t he look like your cousins in Dublin?” I remember thinking he really looked like the man that my fourth grade social studies teacher told us drove the final spike in the transcontinental railroad, but to say that would just be mean. Everyone in those old black and white photos really looked like the only people they were related to were each other.

Those grainy old photos made everyone look sweaty and sunburned. Their clothes were too big and if they were actually looking at the camera, you would think all they really wanted was something to eat. But as detached and indifferent as I was, the look on my relative’s faces when they viewed the pictures was much different. These weren’t images of dust bowl farmers in a text book; they were real individuals that my relatives knew personally. Loved ones captured with the technology of the day. I didn’t want to be mean, but most of the time I really didn’t feel much emotion and I had no Idea what to say.

As technology advanced, so did photography. There a few gray pictures (as my daughter refers to them) of me as a child, but luckily most are in color. My neighbor gave me an old camera when I was probably 10 years old, and while color film was available, it was out of my price range. I wasn’t necessarily the next Ansel Adams anyway and I stand by my parent’s decision not to pay good money for the developing of pictures “snapped” of the back of my brother’s head or vacation pictures of a car lot in North Carolina. Pointing and clicking was cheap, but buying the film and having God only knows what developed was not.

Affordable digital photography has been nothing less than revolutionary. I can now take hundreds of photos and decide if I want them or not in just a few seconds; I can re-take until I get what I want.  I do feel sorry for those who have never experienced the anticipation of driving to Revco to pick up a package of 24 unknown images from a family vacation, fishing trip, litter of puppies and a few shots of the nothing that it took to finish out the roll of film. But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go back to this for anything!

Since Facebook has become “the box of old photos in the attic” for many, I can now anonymously scroll through thousands of old photos whenever I choose. It is easy to spot the digital photos from the scanned images taken from the real box, but not necessarily in the obvious pixel count or color saturation. The old photos are rarely perfect; someone is looking the wrong way; eyes are closed; the group is off center or the lighting is wrong. “Take two just in case”. These photos were taken with the cross-your-fingers-and-pray-for-a-good-one cameras of really not too long ago, but they are as real to me as the perfect pictures of today. I knew these people and I love and miss them. Technology can’t change everything.