Off The Record
Alan Crosby laments the difficulties of identifying the elusive relations depicted in old family photographs
Digital photography is a wonderful thing in so many ways, but it has one disadvantage. It’s simply too easy to take pictures. Those of us over a certain age remember trying not to waste a shot, knowing that we only had 36 exposures per film and they had to be used prudently. There was the ritual of taking the roll of film to Boots to be developed, and the apprehension when your photographs were ready – what if they hadn’t turned out well? Now we can take any number of pictures with our smartphones, and we can improve them in a multitude of ways.
However, there are so many of them that, if you are like me, you never get round to methodically deleting the ones that are rubbish, or rationalising the duplicates. They also have to be labelled or identified – a task that is time- consuming and tedious. Some people are really efficient about this, but for me it’s one of those “I’ll do it next time there’s a rainy day” jobs.
Mind you, it was like that long before we went digital. In the days when you didn’t waste a frame on scenery, you concentrated on pictures of people. And there’s the difficulty. Unless someone was assiduous in recording the vital information on the back of the photograph (who is it? where is it? when is it?) then their descendants probably won’t have a clue as to the subject, and the old people that they might consult are likely to have forgotten assuming they even knew in the first place.
My sister recently sorted through a box of old photographs dating from the early 1920s to the end of the 1950s. Some we could identify easily – Mum’s sister after she’d emigrated to Canada, with a lot of snow, or Dad as a young man, thin as a rake and with lots of curly hair (not how we remember him!). But there were dozens of those faded sepia snaps that are so familiar and frustrating. Is that pleasant-looking young woman with shoulder-length hair really Grandma, and who is that with her? Auntie Kittie perhaps? Surely that can’t be Mum, but it’s definitely not Brenda, so is it Betty? Might be. If only there was a date on the back. It’s at the seaside, so could it be Blackpool – but no, there’s nobody else in sight, and that was quite impossible at Blackpool in the 1930s. Is it Rhyl? Who knows?
At some point my mother clearly tried to provide answers, and had tentatively identified some (“Might be Jack and Joan”). There was a wonderful photograph of her, with my father and four of their friends, sitting on a beach on a sunny day, two of the girls in fashionable bikinis, and the men with non-skimpy trunks. On the back, with confidence, she has written “Ventnor 1952”. It’s the only picture of their holiday in the Isle of Wight, when they were recently married and not yet with children.
But what about this portrait study of an anonymous young man, on the back of which somebody has scrawled in pencil “Who is this?” Or this group of 24 young people standing around a piano, among them my mother and father – what was the occasion, and who are the others? I have no idea, and there are no hints in the picture itself. Was it a school reunion, or a cricket- club social, or the office outing? It’s anybody’s guess.
So, now there’s that agonising choice. Should I get rid of the unidentified pictures, knowing that almost all of the people involved are no longer with us, and the few who are left can no longer recall the names of acquaintances from so many years ago? Or should I keep them just in case? I can’t make up my mind, but one thing is certain – I really must label my own digital photographs, or my children will be faced with the same dilemma!
Should I get rid of the photos, or keep them just in case?