A third reflection on the 10,000 photos that I can access any time

In two earlier pieces I have reflected on the 10,000 photos that I can access any time. They are either personal to me or were sent my way, as prints or digitally. I am trying to break this theme into smaller chunks, under 1,000 words per post. We are dealing here with more than a lifetime’s worth of photos, a lifetime that began in the 1960s.

As noted in both earlier pieces (most recently here) I have thousands of prints stored in various ways: “photo albums, shoeboxes, larger cardboard boxes, plastic storage crates”.

The following 630 words deal with the photo albums, and our most precious box of prints and negatives. They are home to most of the images taken before 1986. That was the year that my brother’s daughter was born. As I wrote in that earlier piece: “From that point onwards I took far more photos then ever before. I bought my first 35mm camera …” That piece explains how we used to get our photos back then (prints and sets of negatives, from a processing lab).

Before 1986, we only had two albums containing colour photos from my lifetime. They both recorded events that happened in the summer of 1984: my graduation from university and my brother’s wedding eight days later. My graduation photos are in a red album, four prints on each side of the page, so you can see eight at a time when you open it out. The wedding photos are in a blue album, exactly the same size and style. I had not, until now, compared them to the Beatles compilation albums I was given in the early 1970s: red first (1962-66) and then blue (1967-70).

The photos were taken using 110 cartridge-based film. The image quality is way below that of 35mm.

There are two prints missing from my graduation photos. I sent one to the Master of my old college and his wife, with a Thank You note. The other I gave to a college friend. The negatives are stored at the back of the album, so I could always get them reprinted. Nearly 40 years have gone by and I have still not done so. The time may come when you can no longer get reprints from 110 film. Maybe it has happened already.  

We have the complete set of photos that were taken before, during and after my brother’s wedding but not the negatives. They were lent to a family friend who wanted reprints and, as far as I know, we never got them back.

Most of our photos from before 1984 are stored in a single photo album and a metal box, slightly wider and slightly shorter than a landscape page of A4. The old photo album is red, six images on each side of each page.

When I first acquired a scanner, in 2008, I spent a few evenings scanning the photos in this album. I copied the files to a Dropbox folder and shared it with family members. The folder is still there, still accessible (and still free of charge) all these years later.

The box of photos is a Teniers biscuit tin, from the 1960s I assume. It contained “A Sweet Tea Assortment of Biscuits and Wafers”. Some of the photos in here have also been scanned and copied to Dropbox, including the group shots from our First Holy Communions.

For many years the photos in the Teniers tin were loosely piled up, not sorted in any way. I have arranged them in small paper wallets, the kind that the processing labs gave you when you picked up your prints. I have put Post-It notes on each of them: “Mum & Friends / in the 1950s / Richmond / Box Hill etc” says one. There are far more photos of my brother (the first-born, and a very good-looking baby) than there are of me or my sister. A small paper wallet from Westons Chemists contains most of the photos of me under the age of 10 that are not in the old red photo album. There are around 20 of them. My Post-It note reads: “Mainly SEAN / Baptism / Communion / A fat little baby”.

Perhaps I should offer you photographic evidence of all this, but that would add to the 10,000+ photos that already take up my time and attention. Any new images would not take up physical space, which is a blessing, but I’ll leave it for now.

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