Pictures, Pictures, Pictures

So I've always been a little obsessed with taking pictures. I like to document moments and people and places so I can always remember them. Sometimes when I'm having a really perfect moment, I just get this feeling like, I have to record this on film, otherwise, I might forget, which just terrifies me like you wouldn't believe. So needless to say, I have thousands of photos, many of which I took before the invent of the good old digital camera.

This has led to me having hundreds of photos in albums and hundreds more in boxes. Add to this old family photos and you get a shitload of pictures.

I've recently started tackling this project where I scan in all my old photos and I realized something last night: it is going to take me very near to the end of my life to scan in all of my photos one at a time. It is extremely time consuming, and if you factor in the time I spend getting nostalgic over suddenly remembered people or experiences, entire nights of my life get written off. I'll start scanning and remembering and next thing I know, 5 hours have past, the sun has set and it's time to sleep.

But still, I need to do it. I especially am keen to scan in all my grandmother's old photos, because they are fading and I don't want her to fade. She needs to remain forever, digitized in my computer. Half the people in the photos I don't know, and my parents don't know, so often it is just a photo of my grandmother with some random people. I wonder if these are even worth keeping, but Lord knows I can't get rid of them. There is someone in that photo that is loved. I feel like I need to keep these scraps of my grandmother's life and put them together while I can; piece together the events the best I can with my mom and aunts help, because dammit, I didn't ask my grandma when she was alive. But oh, is it time consuming, the scanning.

The whole idea of a camera just amazes me, it amazes me that someone invented something that can capture a moment in time. As much as photos can be made to represent something that is not always reality, it is in a sense always a certain kind of reality because what is in the photo, it happened. On some level or another. You can rewrite memories and you can make things seem better or worse then they really were, but the people in the photo, the background, the colours? They were all there...for real. People put on acts for the camera all the time; look happy when they are sad or look excited when they are bored out of their mind, but the photo still captured them. Their life; their existence.

Anyway, I have 20+ albums to scan in, as well as boxes (big, big boxes!) of photos. I feel like they will be way more protected if I scan them in and them make copies on a disk. If the house is burning down, it will be a lot easier to grab a computer and some cds, then it would be to cart 20 albums plus two giant Tupperware containers full of pictures. This is what I think about. And the pictures are the first thing I would grab. They are the only thing I can think of that I own that could never, ever, be replaced.

So, even if it takes me until I'm 82...I'm scanning them all.