Old Lad

Like most of us I suspect I embraced the age of the digital camera and the convenience it brought to photography. I remember the days of the old film cameras. The ritual of taking the film out after a holiday, posting it off to a processing laboratory and then waiting with trepidation to see which photographs had come out and which were what you intended them to be. The great advantage of digital cameras and phone cameras is that the image you save is what you took at the time.

I was scrolling through my Ipad the other day and was amazed to see that I have nearly 3000 photographs saved in this thing called The Cloud. It brought home to me the fact that we now rarely print out photographs. And yet photographs are the key to memories – along with other things like sounds, music, or smells. I have a large collection of photograph albums which record early family life and in many ways turning the pages of an album is more pleasurable than scrolling through a device. Its just a year since my wife Anne died and memories are important. She had a prolonged period of ill health in her last 3 years including, sadly, the development of dementia. So I became a full time carer which looking back was a very intense experience. In remembering Anne the problem at the moment is that my recall and memories are dominated by this period and it’s difficult to call up memories of happier times. So that is where photographs are a crucial part of remembering our long life together.

However I now wonder about the fragility of my photograph collection that is in digital format. If and when we experience a serious cyber attack which could take out the “Cloud storage” in the massive data centres we are building, will all my digital photographs be destroyed? the tech experts claim to have back up for this sort of contingency but recent events where businesses have come under attack and be virtually paralysed does not give a lot of confidence. So perhaps we should consider printing out more photographs in the future to preserve our memories.. When I was studying physics at school we had a dark room and there was something quite mystical about developing photographs -watching the images appear out of the developing fluid bath and then printing them out, mostly black and white prints of course. I have spoken before about visiting an exhibition of Royal Photography and the power of black and white images. In fact if I am honest I get much more pleasure from visiting a photographic exhibition than an art gallery. I think it is right that the camera doesn’t lie

I think we should all resolve to save a few more prints of photographs in an archive. Its important for the next generation who may not be able to access our digital devices after we depart. Time for a coffee and a browse through the photograph albums!