"The Old Family Photos Project: Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep" (Jan 2018)

sterioma

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Interesting blog post.

I took a lot of photos of my children until they were toddlers, and then life got in the way (including moving to a different country) and I substantially reduced the amount of family photos - and (obviously) now regret not having some candid portraits of my kids as they were going through their teenage years.

I do care about my "personal projects" in photography, but this post is a reminder that maybe I should spend more time with a 35mm around my neck at home and just "document".

Link to the blog post here.

 
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Alan Edward Klein

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A lot of people today take family photos with their cellphones, even if they shoot film as well for other stuff. The issue today is many don't seem to have a plan to offload and store them properly or print any of them or just a few. They leave them on the cellphones and transfer them when they upgrade the phones.
 

Don_ih

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It might be a browser issue or some other weird thing.

sterioma said:
this post is a reminder that maybe I should spend more time with a 35mm around my neck at home and just "document".
Click to expand...

I agree. I try to take lots of photos around the house and when we go out anywhere. The majority of my photos are of my family.

Going through inherited photos is a task that gets exponentially less fun the more photos there are. But my parents didn't leave me many photos to sort through, which ends up being a bit of a disappointment.

Anyway, there is a definite value to prints. In that blog post, she was sorting through thousands of slides. While you do get to see the photo, it's not that easy to assess it without projecting or scanning it. A print, on the other hand, you can judge fairly rapidly. And unlike slides, I think most people culled the herd of photographic prints when they came back from being developed - and tossed the duds right away. I think most people who didn't put the slides in dedicated carousels or shuttles probably kept all the slides in the box they came in from the lab.
 

ntenny

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This is a topic of importance to me, because I’ve become the main photo archivist for several generations of avid photographers. I agree very much with the principles of the article, but to some extent that may reflect personal taste; among the family snapshots, I like the “slice of life” candids, but I think a lot of viewers really prefer to look at posed photos of people smiling in conventionally scenic or famous settings.

Many of us have aspirations to photos as art, which is a separate category; my great-grandfather’s many landscapes are more like paintings than like family snapshots, and “what shall we do with a previous generation’s art” is a hard question. I don’t know what we should be doing to make our fine-art photos more manageable for future generations, beyond obvious things like “store in a reasonably sorted way”.

-NT
 
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sterioma

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ntenny said:
This is a topic of importance to me, because I’ve become the main photo archivist for several generations of avid photographer
Click to expand...

I am the first in my restricted family to have taken an interest in photography other than "snapshots". so I don't have a body of work passed down from previous generations. We have the usual "shoe" box with photos and other personal items (the oldest being a pocket watch from my great-grandfather from the late 20s), but nothing of artistic significance.

Still, of all the wet prints that come out of our laundry, the only ones to get a mild interest from the wife are portraits of our kids, so I don't think the rest of content of my "print" black box will be a prized item in 50 years.
 

Don_ih

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ntenny said:
“what shall we do with a previous generation’s art”
Click to expand...

That is a hard question, especially when the art is widely (or completely) unknown to the rest of the world. Without monetary value, most things that are personally irrelevant are simply a burden. I don't expect much in the way of preservation for my own photographic masterpieces
 

ntenny

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To me, the hard part (within the “family” scope) is guessing when something will really become personally irrelevant. Three or four generations down the line, a creative artifact of the current generation might be a really prized possession, or completely unwanted, or a complicated white elephant (“we can’t throw it out for sentimental reasons, but nobody wants it for aesthetic reasons”). Hard to predict.

-NT
 

Sirius Glass

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Shortly after my oldest child was born, I set up my Minolta SLR with a strobe and taught my wife how to use it. Since the camera was always there and ready to many one time childhood events were captured that usually never get photographed.
 

koraks

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Don_ih said:
It might be a browser issue or some other weird thing.
Click to expand...

Try this: https://estherschindler.medium.com/...-photos-that-people-want-to-keep-ea3909129943


And I recognize the things she says about 'how to take good family snapshots' (as I'd paraphrase it). Photograph people as they're actually doing something, try to include some kind of information on time/date and context, and don't limit the picture-taking to holidays and other 'highlights'. Photograph the mundane, the ordinary, the things you overlook as you're experiencing them.

The slides my sister and me appreciate the most, apart from those featuring lost loved ones, are the ones that show the homes, furniture, toys, utensils and all the other ordinary stuff that aren't special in any way, except that they have all those feelings and memories attached to them. The slide with yours truly, age 2, with the blue foam football I got as a present at the local bank office (hey, it works; the bank still exists and they're the ones collecting our monthly payments on the mortgage), is more precious to me than the slide of mum (died 1987) on holiday in Croatia in 1974 (I totally get why dad photographed her because contrary to what's suggested in the blog, she did look great in a swimsuit). Why? Not because of the composition, or of being able to look at 2-year old me - it's because I totally forgot about the whole thing, but upon seeing that slide, I could feel that ball, I remembered what it felt like to loose those things precious to a toddler in the jungle of our backyard, it brought the association of the dark clouds of a clearing thunderstorm in early spring - and many other things that would take a novel to put into words, and I'd still not succeed in explaining even to myself what they felt like.

Photograph the dinner table as your doing a jigsaw puzzle with your nephew. Photograph your wife as she cooks dinner. Photograph the stopover at a gas station when someone decides you need a coffee/sanitary break/something to eat. Photograph the silly, mundane, uninteresting stuff. Because it's interesting.

Oh, and there's one more thing I don't necessarily agree with in the blog - don't crop too tightly. Compose a little wider. You'll miss the blue football in the tall grass otherwise.[/url]
 

MattKing

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The most important, and frankly easiest step to take is to make sure that notes or other sources of background detail accompanies the photos themselves.
 

Don_ih

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Definitely hard to predict. You not only don't know what's going to become generally more interesting but also what may be specifically interesting to some particular people you'll never get to meet.

koraks said:
contrary to what's suggested in the blog, she did look great in a swimsuit
Click to expand...

That was probably a preoccupation with the blog writer - that people should look good. Toss out the photos where X has his eyes closed, don't bother with photos of people on beach towels. Martin Parr would have no career if he'd followed that advice.
 

Vaughn

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From the first day home from the hospital until they dispersed into the world after high school, I folded the boys into my photography...snapshots to carbon prints. I hope to get a portfolio or two for each boy made before I kick off.
 

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AZD

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MattKing said:
The most important, and frankly easiest step to take is to make sure that notes or other sources of background detail accompanies the photos themselves.
Click to expand...

Very true. Fortunately the movies, slides, and negatives I inherited from my grandfather are mostly labeled. Each of the several dozen 8mm movie tins has a paper circle in the lid with brief typed descriptions of each major sequence. That’s almost as interesting as the movies. The time it must have taken to do that…

Clearly he was a very organized person. Apparently not my genetic inheritance though. Funny story: when I was 16 he gave me his old Zeiss Ikoflex Favorit TLR with the original box and papers, and a cool art deco plastic lens cover. “Most people would have lost it in a week!” he said. I lost it in a week. I still have the movies, slides, and negatives.
 

ntenny

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I’ve run into some pretty bad documentation. My mom’s slides from the 1950s were boxed up, with a label in the box saying which frame was what, but the slides were completely out of order, rendering the label useless. I’ve got a family slide that’s labelled on the mount with the single word “People”.

And a friend of mine has an old family print, date and subjects unknown—one of those where everyone knows they’re family but no one can remember who—with a helpful note on the back that says “Taken three days ago”. It’s so elegantly useless that you sort of have to admire it.

-NT
 

koraks

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ntenny said:
I’ve got a family slide that’s labelled on the mount with the single word “People”.
Click to expand...

That reminds me of a box that sat in our shed for two years after we moved in our present home. My wife had neatly labeled it, with the highly descriptive words "stuff for in the house".
 

MattKing

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The date imprinted on Kodak processed Kodachrome slide mounts has been a critical clue in much of my detective work.
But it amazes me how many non-Kodak customer film envelopes don't have the year on them - just the month and day!
 

MattKing

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And in case this hasn't occurred to you yet, if any of the people who might help you with information are still around, don't wait until after you have organized things to attempt to talk to them!
 
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