My Grandpa recently passed away. After the funeral we were looking through shoeboxes full of his old photos and I couldn’t help noticing a response I kept having. I was fascinated by all the photos of people, wether I recognized them or not, but whenever I would come to a pile of nature shots, or vacation photos full of architecture and tourist attractions, I would impatiently flip through them until I encountered more human faces.
My photography teacher stressed this principle to me back in freshman year, but I was still surprised to discover it for myself: human interest is key. No matter how interesting you think a building or an animal or a tree is now, the only pictures that will count in the future will be of people. People are important to us. If we know them in the present, we will be fascinated by their younger selves. If we don’t know them, we will be filled with curiosity: who were they? What were they like. Photos we take of ourselves today will help inform people tomorrow of how we lived.
I was struck by this cultural aspect while looking at old picture of my Grandma’s father and his family who immigrated from Sweden. They were lively and loved sport; the girls played ukuleles, the boys wore their dapper American suits and coats proudly. I never had the chance to meet these descendants of mine, but by looking at their lives in photographic print, I have a connection to them that I would otherwise never have had.
In this digital age we have a great opportunity to capture our lives for the future. Digital cameras give us better quality and greater quantity, but there is now a much greater danger of losing our precious pictures to the ravages of time and constant upgrading technology. As long as we vigilantly watch our hard drives for signs of crashing and always, always copy our digital photos to new and better storage means, we should be fine, but I still think the best way to preserve memories is in a shoebox.