Old woman. Old photos.

<p>This woman is my mother in law. She moved in with us recently. She's 91, was a U.S. Army nurse in Europe (WWII) and is the sweetest person I've ever known. As is the case with most 90 year old people, she's got a host of health problems. We nearly lost her a couple of weeks ago. Her husband, a U.S. Army medic, stationed in Europe has "final stage" Alzheimer's.<br>

The photo shows her looking through photos of her family. She's the last one. She knows who everybody is in the book. "This was my brother Ray." "He was a piano player."<br>

It struck me that old photo scrapbooks were so common at one time. I'm sure an old timer like you has one or two in your house. It also struck me that the digital generation won't have dog-eared old scrpabooks to look through. Hard drives fail. CD's fall apart. Photos are fleeting today. Peered at through the display on the back of a camera, then dragged into the little trash can icon.</p>

<p><img src="http://westfordcomp.com/nora.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="424" /><br>

Nora at 91</p>

 

I've often contemplated this enigma too... That most digital photos are easier lost than old photo albums. Hold your Mother-in-law dear, prod her memory. keep her mentally fit! Also encourage your wife to write down as much as she can in the form of memories. I see the whole WWII generation slipping by.

Our memories are enough to laugh at the 60s and 70s but theirs is the change from a rural agricultural

economy to the info age we know today. They watched as the world changed into the modern era, theirs is the last vestiges of the Old-World. I'm fascinated with old photos. Relevance is interesting.

I have a photo album of my wife's distant uncle in the 30s here in Düsseldorf. Amazingly I have photographed many of the same scenes. What's Photogenic remains!!

<p>Write down or tape what she says about the album. My mother just died this last year at 97, but by her last year it was too late to tap her memory, indeed, she was by then confusing things and people considerably. I've got a midsized album and don't know who many of the people in it are.</p>

<p>Nice photo and good advice, Gene. I will try to attach a photo of my Mom at age 90. She passed about 3 years ago. There is only one of her siblings left, a younger sister now in her 90s. An older brother lived to be age 96, and was an Army Air Corps NCO stationed at Hickam Field (Honolulu) on 12/07/1941. I was in Kindergarten at the time. He retired as a Chief Master Sergeant.</p><div></div>

<p>Wonderful.</p>

<p>Gene, you are absolutely right..</p>

<p>My grandmother passed away in mid-November 2008 one week before her 105th birthday..She had virtually no health issues up until the last week of her life, other than memory loss and dementia..She was taking no drugs, the only person in her nursing home to do so..We had her memorial service last weekend..She was the last surviving member of her brothers ans sisters..Is is amazing how few photographs that we had of her, and her family..The ones on display at her service came from many different members of the family, as well asthe children of her friends..</p>

<p>The digital generation is going to wake up one day and realize that electrons in a storage device of some kind is a very ephemeral way to try and archive memories..Something more tangible is to be desired..I am increasingly seeing on various photo forums posts that state that serious digital photographers should have multiple backups, say 3-4, of <strong>every</strong> digital file that they value stored in multiple places around the United States to try and ensure the files safekeeping..Like I stated on another photography forum, are these people really listening to what they are recommending for people interested in digital photography to do in order to safely archive their memories / work?..Does anyone believe that any of the great film photographers of the past felt it necessary to have 3-4 copies of every negative, positive, and print stored in multiple places around the USA in order to insure their safekeeping?..Of course not!!!!..</p>

<p>Other than controlling the temperature and the humidity of the room in which film negatives, positives, and prints are stored in, and choosing proper archival storage materials with which to store them; there is little to do to insure the long term archiving of such materials..Long term archival storage of digital files is going to require far more of an investment in time and money than the average photographer is going to be willing to put forth..After a couple of years those electrons in their storage devices are going to start deteriorating far more rapidly than will a film negative, positive, or print that is the same age..The end result in many, many cases is going to be nothing more than the memories in peoples brains, nothing tangible to pass along from generation to generation..</p>

<p>Gene, that's a precious picture, and I would take great pains to make a square crop of that and preserve it for as long as I could. The phenomenon you point out is quite curious, I have pondered why we no longer print for real albums anymore? I definitely agree that the ambiance of viewing a dog-eared album is far warmer than gathering around the widescreen monitor. I think this discussion is spurring me to think about not just printing digital pics for hanging on the wall. But, you know, I am finding most negatives for the pics in the albums have long disappered in my extended family. I posted a <a href="../casual-conversations-forum/00SJcF">pic in this thread</a> where my 75-year old mother is holding a picture from an album that was taken 50 years ago, but sadly the negative of the print is nowhere to be found.</p>

I recopy my CDs and DVDs regularly and reprint my pictures now and again. I still have my dad's 35mm slides from the 40's and 50's, but know full well that my digital images will not fare as well without periodic maintenance.

<p>Wonderful photo, Shash.</p>

They are wonderful images.

<p>Excellent post. Photo albums have withstood the test of time. Besides storing my digital photos on CD's, I also have the keepers printed at the local department store and then I put them in albums.</p>

<p>It sad when you think about it . I put photos a few years ago on floppy disc and or zip disk and they are almost obsolete. I have many photos of my dads family that no one knows who they are. My father was the last one of his generation and just did not get around to writing on the photos who was in the pictures before he and my mother died. I have thousands of pages of negs , that only I know what they are, and they too someday will be lost.</p>

<p>Last year I did two painted portraits for my uncle of his wife's great grand parents. My reference were scans of two badly abused B&W photographs of each of them... the photos had been hand-colored to such a degree that the silver grain was all smoothed out. Details were lost and it was difficult to work up two live size portraits of people I had never and would never meet. I handed the paintings over and I felt they were pretty ok, but I had my doubts about the details, about the character of these people, these real once living souls. </p>

<p>Recently, I was home visiting relatives and I went by my uncle's house to finally drop off the paintings. My uncle and my aunt had taken in her mother, a wonderful little woman who was all smiles. When she saw the paintings she was ecstatic. The last living person who knew these people and she recognized them immediately... she commented on the details even down to the goofy haircut that he kept even as an old man... a detail I thought for sure I had gotten wrong because it just looked so weird. On one hand it was a really satisfying moment as an artist, and on the other hand it gave me pause... how many people will remember us in the next 100 years?</p>

<p>(Warning... blurry PNS digital photos to follow...)</p>

<p><img src="http://www.patrickjdempsey.com/newsite/academy/images/mszigler.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p><img src="http://www.patrickjdempsey.com/newsite/academy/images/mrzigler.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p> </p>

<p>Gene -</p>

<p>What a great and thoughtful post. You're absolutely spot on about albums vs. electronically dependent images, photo's and neg's can last for several generations, the others can be lost in an instant due to many different issues. The only thing I have done to ensure keeping the good ones from the D-70, is to get prints made at lab.</p>

<p>Your Mom in law looks so kind and gentle, it speaks well of you to care for her so much. My Mom left us 5 years ago the 11th of this month, at age 94. Thank goodness she was so well organized, which she was, almost all of the photo's she left were dated, with people and locations identified. I doubt that I could have ID'd more than a third of them by sight.</p>

<p>I whole heartedly second your suggestion, get whatever information you can while your loved ones are still here. And by all means get the significant images backed up by printed photo's, when a digital image is lost, unless somehow recoverable it is just gone.</p>

<p>Thank you, Gene, for sharing so many good photo's with all of your older camera's. Lot's of entertainment, often with some sharp wit thrown in. Cheers.</p>

<p>Patrick </p>

<p>Good thread, Gene. My Mother-in-law, moved in with us last year. She is only 87. Sadly, my Father-in-law never took many photos. We do spend a lot time listening to her tell stories of the old days in Los Angeles back when trolley cars and orange groves ruled the area.</p><div></div>

<p>Gene,</p>

<p>Very nice, very thoughtful, and so true.</p>

<p>I very recently bought, for multiple reasons, a Nikon D90. It can shoot movies.... and the first thing I thought of was trying to capture some of my 78 y/o dad's memories with it. Growing up in the Great Depression, having German POWs working on the family's Ohio farm (bearing in mind Grosjean is German), memories of my older siblings youth.</p>

<p>I think the only images that have an ice cube's chance in hell of making it to the future are the ones you print, and then ID the people, date, and location on the back. It may not be as high-tech as the geo-tagging image on my D90, but it *works*.</p>

<p>You're definitely right, Gene. And you know what the scary thing is? <em>It's already happening</em>. I had pictures that a friend took with a digital camera around 2003, and she burned them on a cd and sent it to me. Guess what...the last time I tried to open the files on that CD, I kept getting an error message. I tried 3 different computers with different operating systems, and neither one of them will read the cd. She doesn't have that computer anymore and doesn't even know where the pictures are. That's it. Those pictures are <em>gone</em>. After only 6 years, the cd somehow got corrupt and it wouldn't read anymore. Now, that's an extreme case...but it shows how easily digital pictures can just disappear. POOF. They're gone.<br /><br />But for course, the pictures that we took with 35mm film, from around the same time, are still perfectly fine. I can look in my photo albums and see <em>those</em> pictures right now. <br /><br />My parents switched to digital back around 2004. Their pictures are kind of just scattered around...some are on cd's, some are on my mom's laptop. My dad was taking the memory card to Walgreens to get his pictures printed for a while. And lately, my mom has been printing her pictures on her computer. But there are so many pictures over the last 4 or 5 years that are just scattered around on cd's, on hard drives, and on email servers.<br>

The ironic thing is that my parents are now completely digital....and I use almost entirely film! <br /><br />But there is hope. I've been around computers my entire life, and the internet has been around for most of my life. So in a sense, I guess I'm part of the "digital generation." But I still grew up with REAL photo albums, and I would much rather look at real prints than seeing my pictures on a computer screen. Also, like I said, I use almost entirely film. I have a digital camera for taking snapshots...but even then, I still prefer to print my pictures.<br /><br />I've also been encouraging my friends to print their pictures and keep photo albums...because keeping your pictures floating around on CD's and SD cards is just asking for trouble. One day all it takes is for a disc to get corrupted and POOF, your memories are gone forever.<br /><br />Very touching thread and pictures. And you're completely right. <br /><br />I just recently took some old 126 negatives that my mom has, to get pictures re-printed and they came out fine. They were from the early 1970's, before I was even born. Now does anyone think that many of the digital snapshots that most people are taking now will be around 30 years from now?? No way. <br /> <br>

<br>

</p>

<p>B&W prints hold up really well, but color prints fade. So the photo albums that my parents made of us as children aren't in great shape. Scanning and restoration helps, but it's important to print the results. So I've resolved to make more prints!</p>

<p>I frequently get emails from well meaning people that go something like this. "I found my fathers camera and I opened it because I thought it had film in it and it did." "Would you like to try to get pictures out of it ?"</p>

<p>Sometimes they include a photo showing the camera laid open with its guts showing. Apparently they think that film is some sort of digital media from the 1940's.<br>

I resist send obscenity laden return emails. That's not easy for me. Even my normal conversations are obscenity laden. Except when I'm in church and I never go to church.</p>

<p>This is a great thread, and it brings up a topic that I worry about. Just an enormous number of digital photos are never printed, and families in the future are going to miss a lot of their histories later on. My family was incredibly lucky because my father was in a business that gave him access to wholesale prices for film and processing, and he took thousands of photographs: prints, slides and 8mm movies. What is more remarkable, he identified and dated 90% of the prints on the back. He is gone, but for the remaining 10% of the photographs we can still ask our 93 year old mother if she remembers the subjects. We are very lucky, and I am trying to keep up the tradition in this generation, but it is going to be difficult with a "digital workflow" which often ends with binary files.</p>

<p>Gene, you always manage to strike a nerve. Not sure if this will motivate me or depress me.<br /> <br /> I heard an NPR program about how the art of scrapbooking faded over the 20th century. They talked about how it was a favorite way for the family to entertain themselves in smaller family farm settings. As pictures become more common (fewer pictures meant you needed to fill in the gaps with a narrative or two), TV and radio become more entertaining, and families began to leave the farm, scrapbooking became less and less of a priority.<br /> <br /> My family is a mess.<br /> <br /> I asked my father a few years ago for negatives from my childhood. I am in my early 20s, and I need to steal this from my father as soon as possible. He has a bad habit of losing things.<br /> <br /> My wife did the same about her baby pics. The current status on those negatives is lost. Fingers crossed on this one.<br /> <br /> I asked my dad's father for his negatives to enlarge/scan. He let me have one strip for a sample. I scanned, he bought a scanner one model nicer than mine. He finished his "scanning project" of my aunt's life up to age 10. I asked for any or all of those or other negatives for contact sheet purposes and prints. He told he that he was "done" with that, that his pictures were no good, and I was told to drop the issue.<br /> <br /> I asked my mom's mother for the remaining photos. She's not sure if she has any left. She felt her husband took too many pictures at the wrong moments. My mother thinks they have been thrown out. I'm in the process of rescuing scrapbook from her father (my great grandfather) but she is protective because it is mixed in with his Mason/Shriner literature. She has offered a piece of furniture to me that is "full of junk." There is one drawer crammed full of prints and scraps from 1890-1940. She says it all needs to be thrown out a few days before I take the dresser. She is sweet, but very deliberate.<br /> <br /> My wife's mother has a number of prints/negatives from the plantation in MS that she won't let anyone duplicate and are stored open air in sunlight.<br /> <br /> My brother shoots digital but says his digital files are too large to e-mail to me. When I ask about prints, I get nothing. He doesn't post to photography sites because of copyright issues...<br /> <br /> On the other hand, I have many many binders full of negatives that start in 2005. I was just a silly teenager and shot digital from 2001 to 2005. At one time, I had 3 backups, and one by one they all failed. Nothing left, I thought I was too poor for decent prints (half the pictures weren't that great anyway)<br /> <br /> I think March may be the month for wrangling up all these jokers and their under appreciated memories.</p><div></div>

<blockquote>

<p>"I found my fathers camera and I opened it because I thought it had film in it and it did."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That's a classic man. Humans really can be silly little monsters sometimes. "I thought the gun was loaded, so I aimed it at my foot and pulled the trigger... sure enough, it was loaded." "I thought the car was out of gas so I took it for a drive to see.... yup it was." or one I've heard a few times... "I thought I drank too much, so I had some more shots, and oh boy, I had already drank too much!"</p>

<p>"Gene, you always manage to strike a nerve." Yeah ? You should meet my wife sometime.</p>

<p>Gene and Patrick,<br>

I can't help it...that's just hillarious. "oh, the camera still has film in it! See!" and then they have the film compartment open. <br>

I think some people are starting to get film confused with video tape or something. They don't understand the concept that film is light sensitive. I've bought a bunch of vintage 8mm movie cameras on ebay, and sometimes the camera will still have an old spool of film inside. So the seller will say that the camera still has "tape" inside, and they will have a picture of the camera, with the film compartment open, showing the roll of film ("tape") inside. I mean, yeah, the chance of anything usable still being on that film is very small...but still, if someone did want to try to develop the film, it's gone now.<br /><br />You want to smack them on the back of the head, like the stupid V8 commercials...DUH! You don't expose film to light, Sherlock! </p>

 

<p>There was a thread on photo net not too long ago about, I Opened The Back of the Camera With the Film Still Inside, Now What? Hey, it's here. Some people just don't know. Nobody told them. We are now followed by a generation that may not really remember a time before the internet and the mass marketing of personal computers. </p>

<p>The view camera guys have probably been shading their eyes all along because the newly marketed equipment doesn't often involve tilts and shifts. </p>

<p>Good thread, Gene.</p>