THE EVERLASTING MOMENT

THE PHOTOGRAPH REPRODUCED HERE

was taken nearly 89 years ago. The subject is my mother-in-law – then aged one – who will turn 90 at the end of this year. The image (as a scanned file) is one of a number being incorporated into a quilt which will be presented to her first greatgrandchild and so will span four generations.

Apart from the ageless nature of this picture – it could have been taken yesterday – and how the little print itself has survived all these decades in exceptionally good condition, there’s all the interest that it’s now creating among my wife’s family and friends. Where was it taken? Is it an inlet, lake or a pond? And why is she seemingly on her own, although of course, there must have been somebody behind the camera? My motherin-law can’t even remember the picture being taken (not surprising given her very young age at the time), let alone the when and the where, and it’s completely unmarked on the back. Yet, here is the power of the print very convincingly illustrated… but will we be able to do the same thing 89 years into the future?

The family album doesn’t exist anymore, and hardly anybody is making prints of the snapshots taken at parties or special occasions. Future generations won’t be discovering old shoeboxes stuffed with B&W photographic gems or packets of colour prints with or without the original negatives. If you are very fortunate, there’ll have been a family chronicler who was diligent enough to create albums and label all the prints or who, at the very least, scribbled a few pertinent details on the backs before consigning them to the shoebox. But even if all you have is a bunch of prints, there’s the fun of the detective work – assisted by other details in the photographs – and, in the minilab era, many colour printers also recorded the date of processing on the back which at least provides a starting point. Can you find the snapshots you took on your smartphone a year ago? Two years ago? Five? Chances are you’ve changed phones a least a couple of times since then. Even if you were using a real camera, where are those five-year-old image files now? Ah, yes… OK… now, let’s see… hmmm.

With film, every frame was printed in postcard-size, good or bad, and we simply discarded the duds. Bigger enlargements were reserved for something considered worthy of the extra expense and this is still true today, but now these are the only photo prints that get made. When did you last make a 4x6-inch glossy on your super-duper A3+ inkjet printer?

However, this goes a lot deeper than just making – or rather, not making – prints. We’ve begun to instinctively assign a level of importance to the images we take and it’s directly related to the device we record them on – the smartphone for snapshots, the camera for photographs (i.e. being more considered and creative). Previously, every shot got the same treatment and, go back further to when photography was newly accessible to amateurs – it was much more all about recording family and friends than creating ‘art’. Now, the emphasis is increasingly on coming up with a visual masterpiece every time (and, in this, even the camera is becoming a bit player), so the everyday subjects and happenings are either completely ignored or relegated to a brief airing on social media. Here today, gone tomorrow. In this regard, social media is anything but social, at least as far as family histories are concerned.

So this isn’t just a plea to get printing again, but to start taking those all-important family photographs again… on a proper camera with proper cataloguing and archiving. And if you can’t be bothered printing them yourself, dump the files on a memory stick and take it to the photo kiosk at your nearest camera store or, better still, make a photobook.

Not only is there the potential future historic value of a photo print, but also the pleasure to be had in the present as they’re so much nicer to handle and view than a smartphone screen. Of course, as with digital image files, there is the little issue of ensuring their longer-term preservation and it’s likely a large number of old prints have survived more through good fortune than good management, but simple albums (or even photobooks) are a promising start and then be specific about what’s to happen with them in the future.

While photography is undoubtedly about visual creativity, an equally important aspect is its ability to record and then preserve precious memories, not just for us to enjoy now, but for future descendants to discover and, subsequently, quite possibly learn more about who they are. Let’s never forget this. If it’s worth photographing, it’s worth printing.