When I was very little – I fell in love with a statue of Mary my grandmother had. I remember looking up at the statue and being entranced by her long graceful lines and the lack of colour. In my emotional memory she was at least 50 – 60 cms tall. Of course that was when I only came up to my grandma’s waist.
I have the statue now and she is only 30 cms tall if that, for me concrete evidence of how a child’s view of the world is different than an adult’s. By the time she died my grandma barely came to my shoulder – someone to be looked down at rather than up to.
Last year was one of death and loss – coming to terms with that created an interesting mood of reflection. While it was a standing family joke that Grandma could talk without pausing for breath, my keenest sense of loss at her death was the loss of Grandma’s stories – stories about times and people and places before casual photography and videos. Compared to the hundreds of digital photos I now take in a year my grandmother’s early life was documented in a small collection of black and white portraits and the occasional snapshot, as was my mother’s and to a greater degree mine. Even with my four older children their life was captured in analogue – I have to look through a photo album to find a picture. I can still remember saving up to pay for a film of a special event to be developed. Photos were taken with care, unlike the 24 I took last night within about 5 minutes.
A couple of weeks ago I had a moment of panic that one of my back up hard drives had failed (which is why I started copying so many photos onto the cloud) Scanning a whole series of photos of my Dad onto my phone this time last year has made them more instantly available and I certainly look at them more. On the other hand we were also talking over dinner last night about the fragility of our online digital photo history, and the interesting choices my husband’s mother had made for the photos she wanted around her in the hospital.
I suspect this is a both/and kind of discussion – being more thoughtful with our digital photo-taking and maybe being more pro-active with getting the best printed so they can be passed around and shared outside of a laptop screen or phone.
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