The Importance of Photographs

[jim10219]

People are too busy these days for the old social slide show. These days, we're forced to work even when we're at home on our days off. The ideas of being "on the clock" and "off the clock" are unfortunately things of the past. And you can forget about the single income family. So I wouldn't expect anyone to go to the expense or hassle of a true slide show or having a traditional picture album put together. It just costs too much time and money. Today, we use Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to post our travels, and let others enjoy them at their own leisure. The basic idea remains the same, it's just been modified to reduce the expenditures of time and money. It may not be as intimate or socially engaging, but it's what we have time for in the modern world.

Every generation forms their new ideas and opinions that frighten and sadden the previous generations. Sometimes progress can be hard to adapt to, especially when we derived so much joy thinking about the past. But before anyone thinks to complain too much about it, remember, you did the same thing to the generations that preceded you, and they complained just as much about it, yet it all happened anyway. Progress is the natural order of things. Don't fight it. You won't win, and will cost you. Happiness only exists in the present. Living your life in the past will make you sad, just as living your life in the future will make you anxious. Yes I'd love to go back to a time when you could make a decent living through attitude and work ethic alone. Today, not even a bachelor's degree is enough. But time only travels in one direction, and the old ways don't work in the new world, so you either evolve or die off.

Back to the smaller picture, the printed photograph isn't going anywhere. It's actually doing a lot better now than it was 10 years ago. Look at all of the new films being introduced or reintroduced! The traditional printed photograph has been usurped in the vacation and family photos department. That's all digital now. And that makes the most sense. It's cheaper, easier to share, and can be endlessly duplicated without cost. But the traditional print is enjoying a strong resurgence in the fine art world. People like art that they can't do themselves. Everyone can snap a photo of a sunset and print it on their computer these days. Very few can do it the old fashioned way, and that process is growing in appreciation because of that. Just look at the boom in alternative processes that have taken off since the digital age began! How many wet plate collodion photographers did you know in the 70's? Probably less than the number today. If anything, people value printed photographs even more now that they aren't so common.

[Luis-F-S]

The most photographed generation will be largely void of photographs in 20 years when their little "boxes" die. Yes, printed photographs can be damaged or lost in fire or flood, but so can the little boxes! Unfortunately, many count on backup to the "Cloud" let's just hope the cloud doesn't rain on their parade. L

[Peter De Smidt]

I've sat through some mighty awful slide shows. You know the ones where people show every slide from their vacation.

[John Kasaian]

I've sat through some mighty awful slide shows. You know the ones where people show every slide from their vacation.

click
"Here's one of Wonda making here famous egg salad sandwiches for our lunch on a picnic table in Yellowstone"
click
"Here is one of a bear."

[John Kasaian]

People are too busy these days for the old social slide show. These days, we're forced to work even when we're at home on our days off. The ideas of being "on the clock" and "off the clock" are unfortunately things of the past. And you can forget about the single income family. So I wouldn't expect anyone to go to the expense or hassle of a true slide show or having a traditional picture album put together. It just costs too much time and money. Today, we use Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to post our travels, and let others enjoy them at their own leisure. The basic idea remains the same, it's just been modified to reduce the expenditures of time and money. It may not be as intimate or socially engaging, but it's what we have time for in the modern world.

Every generation forms their new ideas and opinions that frighten and sadden the previous generations. Sometimes progress can be hard to adapt to, especially when we derived so much joy thinking about the past. But before anyone thinks to complain too much about it, remember, you did the same thing to the generations that preceded you, and they complained just as much about it, yet it all happened anyway. Progress is the natural order of things. Don't fight it. You won't win, and will cost you. Happiness only exists in the present. Living your life in the past will make you sad, just as living your life in the future will make you anxious. Yes I'd love to go back to a time when you could make a decent living through attitude and work ethic alone. Today, not even a bachelor's degree is enough. But time only travels in one direction, and the old ways don't work in the new world, so you either evolve or die off.

Back to the smaller picture, the printed photograph isn't going anywhere. It's actually doing a lot better now than it was 10 years ago. Look at all of the new films being introduced or reintroduced! The traditional printed photograph has been usurped in the vacation and family photos department. That's all digital now. And that makes the most sense. It's cheaper, easier to share, and can be endlessly duplicated without cost. But the traditional print is enjoying a strong resurgence in the fine art world. People like art that they can't do themselves. Everyone can snap a photo of a sunset and print it on their computer these days. Very few can do it the old fashioned way, and that process is growing in appreciation because of that. Just look at the boom in alternative processes that have taken off since the digital age began! How many wet plate collodion photographers did you know in the 70's? Probably less than the number today. If anything, people value printed photographs even more now that they aren't so common.

You're right. I got to experience portions of my daughter's trip almost in real time with Viber.
Just like watching TV.
Kind of.

Personally I'd prefer the oral narrative accompanying slides because of the elevated state excitement expressed when describing a cultural "discovery"
Preferable even to being handed an album of prints and being left alone, other than having to ask "What/where/who is this?"

[Ted R]

Somebody is making prints............................there are automated Kodak print "kiosks" in all the CVS stores I know of, and they deliver everything from 4x6 to 8x10 instantly and the quality and value for money are both good.

[Alan Klein]

When I was a kid, my parents had B/W pictures taken of us kids which were then colored with rouge of some sort to give our skin some color. Early photoshop. Later on when I was a teenager, we had the slide shows. As soon as your relatives or friends heard you preparing the slide projector, they'd all feign headaches and run home, even willing to skip desert.

Now I make slide shows of my vacations as a BluRay movie, with music, credits and a menu, and show it on 4k UHDTV. I even send copies to my daughter. Of course the trick is to start playing it while they're eating desert before they can jump ship. But it still better not be longer than ten minutes or so or people get antsy.

So I've advanced with age. Meanwhile, my daughter who's always clicking with her iPhone is about 2 or 3 vacations behind sending me photos that she always promises me she'll do. In fact, she's in Italy this week with her husband but I still haven't received an email with one shot of an Italian museum or church or restaurant. Maybe her batteries went dead.

[Jody_S]

I have a relative who has 50,000+ (I think, I'm not counting) photos on Facebook. All of herself. All making pouty/duckfaces. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends and relatives also making stupid faces. If I had to sit through a slide show of that, I might just off myself.

I've watched her at family gatherings, sitting on a sofa with her niece, both staring into her phone adjusting their duckface until it's just right, for 45 minutes. Then she'll spend another 10 minutes putting filters on the photo to make herself look like a model. I'm not on Facebook, thankfully, so I never have to see any of the finished products unless my wife finds one particularly amusing and shows me.

It's not that young people don't value photos. They just have a very different view of photography as a social media.

[Eric Woodbury]

Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you

--Paul Simon, 1968

[Two23]

I've often thought that photos have little value until what was in them no longer exists. I've continued to make prints of family vacations etc., made into Shutterfly etc. books. These have been just sitting on a shelf and rarely picked up. I think they are still too current and are taken for granted. OTOH, I consider the shoe box of 120 negs from my grandmother's Brownie made in the 1920s and 30s, and my other grandparents from the 20s to be real treasures. They are photos of things I can barely recall and no longer exist.

I once worked as a therapist in nursing homes and knew a guy who had moved in there in his later years. His room had very little, but he kept large boxes of photos under his bed. He told me he had been taking photos of all the things in his life since he had been in high school and was going through them to put them into albums with captions & explanations. I wish I had done that. In the decades ahead it will be a great historical record.

There are people who buy collections of family photos on ebay. They then try to find out what they can about the family--it's a kind of challenge for them. These kinds of photos used to go for very little but now are going for some noteworthy sums. I find it sad that the original family put so little value on them. A few years ago I came across a Flickr page titled something like "The Beardsley Family." It was a husband & wife and their only son from the 1950s and 1960s. They liked to travel on fancy trains, which were still around at the time. There were a couple of hundred Kodachrome slides of them. The husband owned a small electronics shop near San Diego. The new owner and Flickr poster spent several years trying to find out more about the family and how the slides came to sold off on ebay. Eventually a branch of the family in Arizona filled in the details. It turned out to be a somewhat melancholy tale. The only son married in his early thirties, only be be divorced a few weeks later. It was surmised he may have been a homosexual at a time that was not openly discussed. He died of an infection of some sort in his early 40s. The father died of a heart attack in his 50s, leaving the wife alone in the house for several decades. When she grew unable to care for herself sometime around 2005 she was moved into a nursing home and the household goods were sold off. She died a few years later. No one in the extended family wanted the slides, so several decades of interesting history was lost to them.


Kent in SD