Photographs of the Past

I found myself lamenting today that I wasn’t born post 2007, after smartphones with somewhat decent cameras proliferated our pockets.

Although I grew up obsessed with computers, I don’t have the classic 90s kid picture of me set up at the home desktop. It got me thinking about how I’m not even sure there are that many pictures of the inside of my childhood home at all. Yet when my own children get nostalgic for the past I’ll be able to gift them 20,000+ photos of even the most mundane aspects of their life. As mundane as a random corner of my old home, that I’d so love to see now.

It’s impossible to predict what you’ll care about in the future, so you might as well photograph it.

Anyway, I find myself feeling blue that I don’t have a vast library of photos and videos to dig into. In fact I feel like I grew up in an unfortunate moment of transition from film to digital. Quality took a backwards step and storage of the photos was also up in the air. My photo album peters out somewhere around my 10th birthday and my own iCloud photo library kicks off somewhere around my 16th. It’s not clear I even existed for those intermediate years. Perhaps for the best.

Then I realise that I bet when my parents were young parents, they probably went through the same thought process… wishing their parents had digital cameras, so they could have been more liberal with the shots that they took, rather than saving film for only the precious life events. No doubt, when my children have children they’ll be holding the next revolution in memory capture and lament that their parents only took two dimensional photos and videos. Thus the cycle repeats.

So I’ve decided to catch these thoughts, pause and feel grateful that I have any of these moments captured at all. All our ancestors had, was the resemblance of their offspring to remind them of what was. No back corner of a childhood home can ever be reflected in the freckles of a 3 year old. Then again, she has the face of her mother and maybe that’s more profound than any photo can ever be.









p.s if you’re reading this mum, dw its not a big deal.