I was intrigued by this article about the ongoing effort to document theater productions in New York by making archival videos. For many reasons this is a superb idea, and it would be great fun to have this as your job – capturing timeless performances to inform the work of artists of today and tomorrow.
Of course it’s one thing to do this as a line of paid work and quite another to attempt to make a video and photographic record of your own life and the lives of your loved ones. That can turn out to be time consuming and more than a little wonky. I am guilty of the Cam Dad Syndrome. I spent too much time watching my son growing up through a viewfinder rather than just watching him grow up. And now I’m left with many hours of videotape that must be transferred to digital memory and organized for posterity, though as a 23 year old man with important work to do and lots of obligations, I’m fairly certain he does not want to spend much time in front of the TV, watching himself cavort around the yard as a carefree 7 year old.
Not right now, anyway.
But there is a basic watcher/doer conflict there. You can record your activities for posterity, or you can do things worth remembering.
But you can’t do both at the same time.
What kind of visual record will you leave behind?
Trail Baboon 
Good morning. I get a little frustrated when someone wants to take pictures right in the middle of some event or activity. I don’t do that much myself. However, I do like to see some of those pictures or videos. When I worked as an agricultural educator I did take pictures regularly to use for presentations. Also I have pictures from my overseas volunteer work. I just threw out a bunch of old slides from my agricultural work.
We have all kinds of family pictures that are only partly organized. In addition I have some pictures of my relatives that were given to me that also are not very organized. I am afraid that there will be plenty of pictures left around when I am gone that some one will have to put in order or just put in their pile of things that could use some attention.
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you have reminded me of the boxes of video tapes I have somewhere of my 26 and 24 year olds. my need to spend serious money on a video camera was constantly being mocked by cutting the prce in half the next year. the technology changed so fast that the video tapes were challenged as to the ability to be able to replay them on anything because the technology went away as fast as it appeared. the tapes of my children riding bikes blowing out birthday candles, playing baseball basketball football soccer hockey doing karate piano recitals acting in the class pays performing in the choir, singing Christmas carols eating easter and thinksgiving meals searching easter leavings from the easter bunny opening christmas presents and hamming it up for still shots that used to exist in film negatives now on hard drives somewhere in the archives of time for me to discover or not as time goes on and I get to decide if I am to recover or forget the files and tapes and negatives i made. faces smiling brightly for the cameras exist in boxes next to the vcr tapes of cbs sunday morning and cassette tapes of christine sweets reading wonderful stories while I rested in my bathtub on Saturday mornings and phc on Saturday afternoons with talking minnesotan, . recordings of all the great movies, great tv shows like leave it to beaver great songs great moments in time like the twins winning the pennant in 87 and 91, boxes and boxes of files of stuff I would treasure until the end of time.
yesterday I spent the day going through boxes of my moms stash I have stored in my warehouse we have been meaning to get to it for more than a year and it was a quick 5 or 6 hours of opening box after box and putting it in the save it sell it or trash it piles. the save it pile is step one of sorting it to decide what is really worth saving, what is trash and what is of value to someone else enough o warrant putting it in the selling or give away pile. boxes of knick knacks and flower pots of some value but to who? the family memorabilia is even more challenging. svae it but where and how and for who?
sha had some I have way way way more. it will be interesting to deal with over the years to come.
I sent my cousin the family box of photographs form the 20’s 30 \’s and 40’s for him to make studies of for creating some art. he is a wonderful painter and looked to the family files for inspiration of his next phase of work. it will be interesting to see how he deals with it. I told him I have to have it back to archive it for the family. its too important not to. isn’t it?
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Because I was a working photo-journalist for many years, I naturally used my cameras often. Unfortunately, the film I shot professionally–black and white negative film or slide film–was not especially appropriate for recording family events. And yet that is what I had in my cameras, so that is what I shot. I now have many hundreds of family shots that are in slide form. Without a black and white darkroom, all the images I shot on Tri-X are now essentially lost. For a Christmas present to my erstwife and daughter I spent months scanning several hundred old slides so I could put them on CDs.
When we traveled England, Scotland and Wales I shot many hundred slides. Those are now in carousels that nobody ever sees. My erstwife and I will collaborate to get a selection of those slides scanned and converted to some other medium, like maybe a CD filled with images.
Some of the most fun stuff we shot was recorded on a silent Super 8 film camera. I have those films but no longer have a projector that can run them. That’s something else that we’ll probably pay to have converted to a form we can view on computers now.
My sense is that we mostly shot the wrong moments. We brought out the camera for Christmas and birthdays, but we did a poor job of recording the homes where we lived and the normal daily activities that we would like to remember now. I suppose we recorded many moments that don’t seem interesting now, but you can always throw a dull photo away and you can never go back in time to shoot something precious.
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RISE AND SHINE BABOONS!
Groan and Moan. I am now responsible for 5 generations of visual records of my family. We have found pictures documenting the homesteading of S. Dakota and Civil War Army reunions. What to do with this stuff?
Boxes and boxes and boxes of this stuff that came from my mother’s basement, my grandparents’ closets, my great grandparents’ homes.
My sibs, 3 nieces and 1 nephew spent Memorial weekend sorting through this visual record and many related papers (diplomas, farm mortgages, letters, teaching licenses–and the entire test taken to obtain said licenses…). What to do with these items? This has become a burden. We will gather again in October to sort more pictures, many of which will be discarded. Our family has decided to create a family trust to manage these things, as well as future reunions. We will store the images digitally by taking pictures of the pictures or documents or scanning them. Then we will create a website through which family members can access the images
Here are my thoughts:
1. DO NOT DO THIS TO YOUR DESCENDANTS.
2. Many of these items we are donating to several rural historical societies. Some of the mortgage papers (a New Deal Mortgage from 1935–this signed by my grandfather who loathed FDR) appear to document farm life in rural Iowa and rural Minnesota.
3. After we have completed this project and formed a family trust to care for family history, I will consientiousely sort through my pictures and papers to spare my son, nieces and nephews this same dilemma of what to do with this stuff.
Moan and groan.
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I like the family trust idea. But you are in a somewhat unique position, it seems, with more precious historical artifacts to protect than most families have. I wish there were some geeky relative who would feel privileged to attack the job of scanning old photos and documents in order to create a set of CDs or DVDs for the family to treasure (until THAT format becomes obsolete!).
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So why is it that I rarely catch the spelling errors when I read through this stuff BEFORE I hit post?
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My dilemma is one of format. Once the sorting is done (done? Ha!), how to save the good stuff. Will anyone in a hundred years care about photos? Or be able to access what’s on the CD-ROM or the web site. Right now I’m back to putting things on paper and making enough copies for those who want them today. After all, I can still read most of the words in my g-g-g-g-g-grandfather’s will from 1772.
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That is the dilemma–we will store some of the stuff somewhere. The rest will go digital. Our progeny said, “Yes, we care about it.. You can’t keep all of it.” My Geek son advised using a photo storage site for the digital record.
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Good point, leaving hard copy might be best if we’re thinking of our descendants.
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Morning all. I’m the opposite of Cam Dad – a fact that became apparent two weeks ago, when it was time to put together the big photo boards for Teenager’s graduation party. I tend to take photos at the “big” opportunities: holidays, vacations, etc. So we lots of pictures of Child/Teenager at animals parks and camping and all the various holidays. Not nearly as much in between!
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Perhaps someone, at some point, will appreciate my photography. Although it will take a rather significant shift in the popular ‘artistic perception’ that art can actually include humor.
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Daughter always complains that she was sorely neglected when it came to photos, and she is right. Lots of her brother, not as many of her. We had no camcorder or anything like that. I find it so annoying when people record every aspect of their offsprings’ lives, and, truth be told, what do you do with all those recordings? I think oral and written histories are more interesting when they tell you the stories behind the photos. I have a large drawer full of mementos from daughter’s school experiences that I swear i will assemble in some form, some day. As both my parents are still alive in their 90’s, I figure I have another 40 years to get it done.
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I have a suitcase full of my dad’s snapshots and formal portraits of ancestors, but I rarely take photos myself and I rarely look at the ones I have. I’m not sure why–maybe my mom’s dislike of being photographed influenced me, or it’s just that I’m not much for reminiscing. People don’t look like themselves in photos to me, anyway; it’s a rare person whose spirit transmits even through the flatness of a picture (besides, I’m really bad with faces). So, my visual record will be brief, mysterious appearances in other people’s visual records.
Coincidentally, my roommate just emailed me a couple of photos of my youngest cat, taken by Pet Haven before we adopted her (she’s so little, I can’t believe how much she grew!). I’ll be saving those–of the few photos I do take, 3/4 are of the cats. My laptop died last week, and I hadn’t backed up my photos, so I ended up paying extra to get the final pictures of my 17-year-old holy terror of a tortoiseshell retrieved. For years I’ve kept my data (my writing and my Book of Shadows) on a flash drive I carry with me everywhere…but not my photos.Typical.
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What is your “Book of Shadows”, CG? (You may have answered this before…)
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Like Crow Girl, my visual record will be brief. I own exactly one photo of my dad as a child, and none of my mother or her family prior to her marrying my dad. Pictures from my childhood and youth are few. I tend to cull my photos every few years, and find that most of them hold no particular interest anymore; since I don’t have any kids, I don’t really have any reason to hang onto them. Like CG, my pet photos are what I tend to keep.
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Oh, Lord, I have several albums, boxes, and discs or computer files of photos. I come back from vacations with all these wonderful, scenic photos; and the only ones worth keeping are the ones with loved ones. We too have a few of those camcorder tapes from the 80s-90s and nothing to play them on… And at this point I’m not even sure if it’s the first thing I’d grab if I knew the house was going to blow up. In a perfect world, I’d find time to sort this all down to one album… Ditto my mom’s photo shelf. find a day (heck, find a week) with nothing else on the calendar, sit down and enjoy them all together, and keep a select few.
That said, I did get all our home movies (about 45 minutes worth, total) from the 50s put on CD for Christmas presents, and we have a ball watching those.
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Some of the agricultural pictures I threw out recently were from a photographer who worked for the Rodale Institute. He was very interested in photographing farmers who were engaged in a wide range of new ways of farming and other attempts to change to more sustainable ways of farming. His photos were used in a Magazine from Rodale called The New Farm.
He was also trying to establishing a large collection of photos documenting sustainable farming. We were in the process of getting copies of his photos to distributed to farmers to use in presentation they were making at meetings promoting sustainable farming. As we were about to get these photos distributed Rodale decided to end my project and also to stop publishing The New Farm. I don’t know what was done with photographer’s large collection of pictures about sustainable farming.
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Since it is an open question as to who hates having their picture taken more, me or the s&h, I suspect our visual record will be almost non-existent.
One of my sainted aunts scanned the old photos from my grandparents’ home into Picasa, and while not all of them are identified, it has been really fun to have access to them when I work on the family history program I’ve downloaded that lets you put in pictures as well. not that I have worked on that in a good long while.
It also doesn’t help when the general attitude of those who know things that would be helpful tends to be-why do you care? My new answer to that one is going to be, why do you watch baseball? I care because it interests me, isn’t that enough?
Bet I still don’t get answers.
Add me to the list of those who would rather experience things than record them-sadly, this is not a good strategy if your line of work can be enhanced by having a good portfolio of past work. My best stuff was never recorded in a form I could use for posterity. alas.
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I’m grinning wickedly at the memory of all the memento photography my in-laws did in those retirement years when they were doing a lot of traveling. This post will expose me for the terrible human being I have been. My erstwife’s parents were long on photo enthusiasm but woefully low on photographic sophistication. When in vacation mode they shot picture after picture, cranking film through the cameras without considering that basic question: “Who the hell will care about this?”
About twice a year they would have a slide and film show, inflicting all this visual dreck on relatives too polite to turn them down. Not only did they have poor photos but they were not clever about editing images or organizing the slides in coherent sequences. I remember vividly the Super 8 film my mother-in-law shot of her legs as she walked across the tarmac to a waiting airplane. She didn’t know the film camera was running as it dangled from her wrist, flopping and twirling as it recorded the look of her ankles during that long walk. As you would guess, she didn’t have ankles worth preserving for eternity with all that film.
Then there was the slide collection they shot on a Western trip. That one featured some mighty wild jumps in time, so that early in the show you might see the funeral of a dead relative and then later in the show that dead relative would be seen grinning and hoisting a beer. And what I’ll never forget is the portrait of a caramel-colored mutt that wandered into one of their campsite one day. I think they shot that dog seven or eight times. “This is a dog who showed up at the campsite,” they explained as a slide came up showing the dog and then (ten minutes later) another slide (this one reversed) of the same dog showed up. And in a few more minutes the show gave us the same dog upside down or suspended in the air looking down into the ground. “Ummm, this is that dog that showed up,” they would tell us.
What I’ll never be able to convey is how hilarious all this was. The terrible photography began to have a cumulative impact. The poor audience was sitting in the dark to watch all of this, so the hosts couldn’t tell who was laughing so hard. Because it was dark like that we tended to hit the scotch mighty hard. It was the only way to get through 90 minutes of the worst vacation photography in history.
I’ve blogged before about how my mother-in-law had a stroke and lay dying for over a week. We visited her in the nursing home, expecting her to die minute by minute, but she hung and began to scare us that we might never be able to hold her funeral and move on with our lives. Then one night we ran a show of those slides (with seven images of the dog in the campsite) and Esther’s ankles hiking over the tarmac. She was alive when we started the show but dead when we were done, and I’ve always known why.
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You know it’s time to go when…
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Great fun, Steve. Did they ever start to wonder WHY people were laughing in the dark?
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The audience was on scotch. The presenters were on sherry. In the dark there was a lot of hilarity, but nobody paid that much attention to it!
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About 12 years ago as we were transitioning from a little Cape Cod home in the city to a cottage on the lake, I had a rare burst of ambition in every area of my life. I took huge boxes of family photos ranging back to great grandparents up to the present moments. For hours and days, I sat there sorting hundreds of pictures into broad categories: pets; different houses; vacation trips; each of my three kids; weddings; youth; adolescence; marriages; etc. I took large manila envelopes and
simply crammed each presorted batch of photos and jammed them inside, labeling each with its contents. I’m still pleased with this project as it’s come in very handy when a family member asks for images of his/her childhood or special occasions. I just locate the bulging manila envelope and hand it over. This is a very FAR cry from carefully-produced videos or photo albums, but at least the specific categories of several generations are easily accessible.
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I’m thinking of adopting this idea for my mom’s photos, CB!
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OT. Now that we might have a few days in a row without rain, any plans in the offing for Robin-garden assistance??
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I would be on board for that.
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I really want to help with that, but my schedule is so wacko now that it can’t even be termed a schedule. Keep me in the loop and when I know the date and time, I will see if I can fit it in!
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We’re flying out to Bellingham, WA tomorrow and won’t be back until Tuesday evening. Since I can’t do much actual physical gardening but would primarily be there as moral support and sustenance provider, maybe my absence isn’t a big deal, but I’d really like to help in any way I can. So please let me know when the group can get together.
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I would like to show up, too. I worthless as a gardener, but I could help eat the treats.
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Last time I spoke to her she said she didn’t need it, but I’ll be in touch with her over the weekend and find out for sure.
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Digital photography has been both a good thing and a bad thing for me. It is great to be able to take a lot of pictures with no need for film and with the ability to easily get rid of the ones not wanted. It should be easy to enter them into my computer and manage them using a computer program. However, I am very slow at learning to use the computer programs for managing the photos. At one point I had a terrible mess that I couldn’t straighten out. Then I just gave up.
If I need to use a picture I can get it by having some one else enter it into their computer and send it to me by email. I’m sure that some time before too long I will get a little help and finally learn how to use the programs for handling pictures. I tend to feel that I should be able to use new programs without taking any time to really figure out how they work. That approach results in frustrating messes. That’s what happened when I tried to use the photo management programs.
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A ranch friend of ours was going through photos, and was amazed how much money they spent over the years developing photographs. She was pretty dismayed to realize how much money they spent on pictures of their cats.
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This is why I’m thanking the stars for digital. Since the Teenager takes most of the photos now, we have HUNDREDS of pics of the dogs and the cats in a subdirectory on the computer. I don’t even want to think about what it would have cost to develop!
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I haven’t done a very good job of creating a visual record of my life, or of my kids’ lives. When I spent more time taking pictures, I preferred. scenery and close-ups of natural things, not people. And, for me, if I try to photography my kids in everyday life a lot, I would not be experiencing things directly if I was always framing pictures instead of experiencing things and interacting with them (for better or for worse). I’m not sure if this makes sense or not…
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It makes perfect sense.
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