Bring Back the Family Photo Album

—
I was watching the PBS Special on the 1970s yesterday and they showed the old “woody” station wagon. We had a wagon, but not the “woody.” Ours was baby blue.

Our vacations started at some ungodly hour in the morning. My mom would lay the back seat down to make a long bed for my brother and me. She layered sleeping bags to pad it a bit. Then she’d wake us up, we’d stumble to the car, climb in the back in our pajamas with our pillows and go back to sleep as Dad climbed in behind the wheel and mom, map in one hand and her thermos of coffee in the other, climbed in the passenger seat. We were on the road before the sun was up.

After watching the segment, I was motivated to go to the bookshelf and pull out the old photo album. Those photos are almost 50 years old so they are grainy and the colors have dulled, sort of like my memory. But there’s something very special about looking at photographs that sharpen the memory just a bit. One album led to another which led to another. Then there were no more albums.

It hit me. Abruptly. I had done my son a disservice. I had photo albums of him for the first four-or-so years of his life. After that, all his photos are on a CD, a desktop, an external hard drive or a phone. There’s something sterile about looking at photos that way. I can look at the photo album with my feet tucked up under me in an easy chair or sitting under a shade tree in the yard. Viewing the photo album is somehow much more leisurely than looking at pictures on a screen. But it’s not only that.

Back in the day, you took a photo with a camera, took the roll of film to be developed and waiting impatiently for it to be picked up. It wasn’t cheap, either. Today, you pull out your phone, take a hundred pictures of the same thing, toss out 99 and post the winner to your Facebook page. Photos live for about a week these days.

Even my 27-year-old son likes to look at old family photos. He’s more interested in my father’s childhood photos than mine. Two generations ago is a little more mysterious than a parent’s generation. So my grandkids will look at my photo albums and see telephones hanging on the wall in the background. But what will my son’s grandchildren have to look at?

The saddest part of this is iPhone phone cameras and in HP home printers make it so easy to create photo albums that we no longer bother to do it anymore. I’m going to hack my son’s Facebook page, print out all his photos and put them in an album. It’s going to be a Christmas gift for him. To do it right, I need to start working on it now. I have many years to cover!
—

—
Photo credit: Getty Images