The Solace of a Half-Empty Photo Album

Kirk Cameron

(Photo by Kirk Cameron via Unsplash)

 

 

 

It was about six months after the death of my mother that I finally mustered the courage to organize all the boxed and scattered family photos she left behind.

Walking into a boutique, upscale stationery store, I spotted an embossed leather photo album hand-crafted in Italy. Its price shot way over my budget, but after one swath of the hand across its warm, tan cover, followed by a firm grasp using both hands, I knew this was “the one.” That is, the one photo album I never had to call my own, but that would now bridge my mother’s years of life, along with my own as her child, over and across to my daughter, then only an infant.

Anyone with a family—that is to say, basically everyone—qualifies as an amateur archivist.

To give the family photos a semblance of order, we hazard the most accurate chronology possible. Or, if the photographs are old enough, we consult the month and year printed on the white border or back of the photographs. Framing them in adhesive photo corners or using stick glue, we lend these portraits and images just enough prominence and symmetry to give them due honor. All this, hopefully with a cup of tea nearby, is the nearest many of us will get to burning incense and leaving a prayer or two at the altar of our ancestors.

It is a ceremony longed for every time I instead reach for my cell phone to click through images indexed by day, month, and year. The convenience is undeniable, but like so many conveniences of our digital age it also feels too cheap and easy. It is not the loss of the old medium that I mourn, although there is a margin of that, so much as the sense of occasion that the medium of an old photo album affords.

Meanwhile, thanks to the digital age, more than half the pages of my photo album, now twenty years old, remain empty. Digging my album out to stuff a random page not with new photos, but with ticket stubs of a memorable concert or exhibition I am faced with all the years that have passed without being officially documented. Somewhere between pages 25 and 30, showcasing my daughter’s fourth-grade photo and Christmas of 2015, the images cease, as if my photo album took a different route from my own at some mysterious fork in time. Somewhere between the physical world and the ether of the digital, years slipped away, as if they never took form.

Of course, a digital archive can be printed out and made manifest on the page, but it is the silence of not having done so that puts a curious demand on my mind whenever I thumb through the photos on my cell phone. The effect is still warm and personal, but using an object that might also flash or beep with an unlisted phone call or text bot also has the feel of drinking ice water on a winter’s day.

Media accounts pop up now and then about the vintage, retro resurgence of old photographic media: the old Polaroid instant cameras that become the hit of a party, Fujifilm INSTAX models that also offer up fast-developing photos. What could be more refreshing than a goofy shot that cannot be deleted, except if the only existent copy is thrown in the trash? What could be more real and authentic than an image that cannot be endlessly doctored or digitally altered with the latest editing app?

To see today’s youth revel in these relics is like seeing someone ride the first Boneshaker model of pedaled bicycles. The old, even the ancient, becomes new again. Perhaps then the years and the memories will live again on all the empty pages of photo albums everywhere.

Ben Fulton

Ben Fulton is managing editor of The Common Reader. Before moving to St. Louis he was editor of Salt Lake City Weekly, Utah’s alternative newsweekly. His work has been published in New York’s Newsday and has garnered regional awards, including Best of the West and Top of the Rockies.

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