Storied Photographs - An Essay

I remember suitcases full of my cousin’s photos - well maybe only one suitcase. But I was a kid - a long time ago. I still have some of those photos, and photos from who knows where they came from. Black and white, white curvy edges. I even have a little flip one with green paper covers. 

Then there were, and still are, photograph albums. Scenic padded three ring binders made only for holding photos. Photos held under yellowing cellophane on both sides of thin cardboard pages. Most coloured, but some black and white. Especially the ones in two big white albums that all of the babies, children and parents through many decades - even my grandparents. Grandmother up from Maryland, U.S.A. My dad’s hunting buddies from as many decades ago. Photos of people whose faces look familiar but no name comes to mind. Everyone remembers a different name, if at all. 

Those albums are in a big cardboard box with loose photos taken through the more years, more places and time. Framed pictures taken down from walls with each move. Old pins from dad’s Elks club or mom’s Royal Purple ladies. Patches from my son’s minor league baseball club. An old passport with the corners cut off, a little notebook with my dad’s farm lists - or maybe it’s mom’s writing.

Today the suitcase is this laptop. Flat coloured images of friends traveling on Vancouver Island, my trips back to my second home in Texas, working at the fruit stand in Kelowna, weddings, babies, kids. I can make any of the black and white, change their colours, crop them to fit what ever I need, fix the poor exposures or just delete them. All the duplicates I can take care of - but that would involve a lot of mind numbing work. And there is another problem with them. I can’t write on the back of each picture in pencil or pen so that three decades from now grandkids can say ‘That’s my grandpa’s handwriting! See the funny way my aunt wrote all curvy!’ Of course there may not be anything like handwriting in thirty years.

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”

~ Ansel Adams