Precious Memories Are More Than Just A Kilobyte Screensaver
The Age
Thursday April 24, 2008
FORTY photos. That's pretty much all I have in my childhood photo album, 40 PHREAKIN' PHOTOS - I don't know whether it's because photos got lost over the years, or whether film stock was pricey back then, or whether nobody wanted to take pictures of me because I was a grotesque, gimpy gargoyle with so much gum in proportion to his teeth, every time I smiled for a camera it was like I was regurgitating a pancreas.
Forty photos: that's all the precious memories I have of my youth - a few school concert shots of me playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard Of Oz, my tail hanging obscenely between my legs with Dirk Diggler abandon. A few holiday snaps, usually with me kneeling beside a rock because my father's a geologist and he needed me for scale. And a bunch of birthday party photos, but I'm not necessarily in them all: my mother's a gifted cake-maker who's very proud of her creations, so there'll be a close-up of a magnificent 3-D Humpty-Dumpty-on-a-wall cake, and way off in the corner you can just make out a bit of my lips blowing out the candles, a fine spray of spit heading towards Humpty's marshmallow and liquorice top hat.FORTY PHOTOS: THAT'S ALL I'VE GOT TO MARK OUT THE EARLY YEARS OF MY LIFE, and now that I have kids of my own, nothing much has changed - they also will only have 40 photos to remember their childhood . . . BUT 40 PHOTOS EVERY HALF-MINUTE OF THEIR WAKING AND SLEEPING DAY. My beloved and I are taking pictures of them eating, drinking, farting, sneezing, walking in through a door, walking out through a door, standing in front of a door, staring at us confused, wondering why we're taking photos of them in front of a door. Photos of birthday parties that are so colossal in quantity, each party needs to be archived in its own Google data storage plant. Photos of holidays that are so extensive, you could print them all off, stack them in chronological order, flick through with your thumb, and watch the entire vacation as an animated feature in real time. Blame the digital camera: they're just so easy to use, that parents will fire off photo after photo without care or timing or art, thinking that we'll delete the bad ones later, but we never do, because "some day someone may want to reminisce about that out-of-focus knee". So we wind up with semitrailer loads of mediocre digital images that no one is EVER going to look at - and if they did, they'd need a research team and CSI facial-recognition software. Digital cameras are cheapening the specialness of a single photograph, killing the preciousness of a memory - photos have become disposable, commonplace things that just get stored away inside Econovan-sized hard drives, or emailed around as low-res attachments that no one can open, or printed on cheap streaky paper with an empty ink-cartridge, so everyone looks like a jaundice patient hiding behind chickenwire.Gone are the days when families would pore over photo albums together, everyone giggling and merry because of the fond recollections, and also because they're whacked-out on that toxic photo-album adhesive. Now when a family wants to look at photos, they have to huddle awkwardly around a computer screen, elbowing each other out of the way like teenage boys who've just worked out how to disable NetNanny. Gone is the romantic notion of an old, glossy photograph with a crimped white border perched on a mantelpiece, or framed on a wall, or granted pride of place - stuck to a fridge with a council bin-day reminder magnet. Now photos are downloaded onto digital frames with 24-hour slide-show rotation, so you see your entire life flashing before your eyes to the love theme from Cinema Paradiso. Memories have become nothing but mundane, momentary screensavers. Forty photos is all I may have, but they're worth 40,000 photos today - even the one of me grinning stupidly, looking like some kind of "gum inflammation" warning poster in the foyer of an orthodontist.
© 2008 The Age
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