Too Many Photos, Too Few Memories

Only a few decades ago, taking photos was tedious business. The cameras were largely manual and not exactly cheap. Film had to be paid for and processing it took time, legwork and, yes, more money.  It was only the relatively well heeled who could indulge their passion for it and clicking good photos took some understanding of the camera and its settings..  Photography thus had both class and knowledge barriers attached to it. Perhaps it is this relative difficulty involved in taking photos that made people attach a higher value to the end product.

I still leaf through my mother’s photo albums of the 1950s and 1960s with a sense of awe and reverence. The black and white photos, most of which are tiny in size compared to today’s prints, were neatly pasted in albums that had paper as the base. The paper made it easy for my mother to write the captions below the photos thus ensuring that even half a century later, after the photos had faded,  and even if my mother was not present to explain the picture, I could still understand the who, what and where that the photo represented. 

Sadly the coming of plastic albums where photos had to be simply slotted into a sleeve meant an end to captioning of photos and this dealt the first blow to photos being a repository of memory.

The plastic sleeve had another problem as well. The photos which were stuck on paper earlier could now be easily removed from their sleeve. This increased the demand from relatives and friends for photos to be  taken out “just for a  few hours” only never to be returned. Soon, some of the best and most memorable of photos simply disappeared.

The present situation is even more tragic. The explosion in digital photography involving a variety of devices including cameras, mobiles and tablets has diminished the value and importance people attach to photos. Everyone has a vast collection of photos sitting in different kinds of storage – computer hard drives, CDs, pen drives, phones. They are rarely revisited and soon with changes in technology and/or device where they are stored they get lost forever.  It is a cruel irony of sorts that people take far too many photos these days, but have fewer memories to show for them. The growth of social media like facebook, Instagram, etc has to some extent addressed this problem but relative to the number of photos being taken and the number of people taking them, those using them on social media to make a point or tell a story represent  a drop in the ocean.

At Best2Display we are seriously concerned that people are not using photos to tell important stories of their lives, stories that help transmit precious memories to future generations. We hope the photobiography concept we have pioneered and are actively promoting will help people use their photos effectively to do just that. That way they can ensure some degree of immortality long after they are gone.

 Binu S. Thomas --