Recently, I was looking for a photo-a real, printed photo–of a college-age me standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Try as I might, I couldn’t locate it among the boxes of ticket stubs and floppy disks from those days.
At first, I was sad. After all, standing there in front of one of the world’s most famous landmarks was a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming moment. I had a digital camera on that trip–one of the first on the market–and I remember it could hold very few photos. As I waited for a ferry to cross from England to France, I purchased a few disposable cameras to capture the rest of my trip. When I was stateside again, I had them sent off for prints. After thinking about this for a while, I actually began to feel happy about searching for this lost photo.
When I was little, my mom had a cigar box filled with snapshots of childhood. It still exists, and to this day I can almost tell you, down to the photo, which memories are held there. I love the faint chemical smell released when I open the lid. I smile when I hold each print in my hand, tracing a finger lightly over the face of a relative who is no longer with us.
I also have numerous cloud storage accounts, external hard drives and thousands upon thousands of digital photos. My husband is an archivist, so with little to no effort we can locate nearly every photo we’ve taken in the past ten or so years. Our son’s life is documented in these pixels. Scroll further back. The time we vacationed in the Badlands. Scroll. That period when we went camping almost every weekend of the summer. Scroll more. Wedding, Honeymoon. Our old cars. Parties. An ice storm. The big and small moments that make up lives.
One day, when our son graduates or gets married if he wants to–someone will probably put together a slideshow. Nobody will scan those images to make a powerpoint presentation. No shoe boxes scattered about, looking for that time he fell down the hill at Yorktown Battlefield or the first time he put his toes in the ocean. These memories will be easily found. When you take a photo of a child now, he or she will probably know two things: How to take a photo him or herself and to look at the small screen to see how it turned out.
There is a certain romance to searching for something. Maybe it’s the tangible nature of leafing through an album or the charm of stumbling across an old theater program. I relived my entire European adventure while looking through boxes of stuff I’d cursed a million times as being in the way. Do you get that same effect from opening files on your PC?
So what to do? Digital isn’t going anywhere, and honestly, I love it. We still print photos, but that’s only a small fraction of the thousands we’ve taken. Pixels it is.
But at the same time, I am secretly hoping for a misnamed file folder or a digital photo dump that was never organized as it should have been. For when I’m much older and our son is taller than me and marking some momentous occasion or telling a significant other about his childhood, I hope he has to search. Just a little bit.
