Wallet Photos

Several times in the last two weeks, I have been asked if I have pictures of my family, especially Mom, with me. To my chagrin, I had to reply in the negative. 

I have hundreds of family pictures but they are all digitized and safely stored in the iPad and in the cloud. What I do not have are wallet pictures. I wonder if people even do that anymore…carry Kodak moments in their wallets. Most folk I know carry images and small videos in the cell-phones, which is less than useless here in the middle of the North Atlantic. Is this another instance of the divide between digital natives and those who dwell in the analog past?

Digital images never fade. They remain as crisp and colorful as the instant they were created. Generations from now, descendants will call up a picture of great-great-great Grandpapa in all his startling reality. What will we have lost when those ancient images are no longer blurred and faded with age? Will some of the romance of the past die with them? Will future children never enjoy the wonder of the hunt to find when and where the picture was taken because it was geo-tagged so can never be lost?

I miss those evenings when the family gathered around the photo albums and speculated about many of the yellowed and faded images pasted there.  Where was Pop when he was snapped wearing those hideous sheep-skin chaps? (Dad thought it was Idaho; Mom thought it was Montana.) What was the color of Uncle Will’s sporty roadster displayed in the 1926 photograph?  What color were Great-Grandma Moore’s eyes? No one knows, but the mystery lead to lively discussions and conjectures. These moments of wondering add a degree of imagination to family history; will future Mayers lose this magic as they leaf though album after album on their iPads or iPhones? 

I have been scanning old family photographs and tintypes so we don’t lose the images when their paper finally dies. Intellectually, I recognize the advantage of digitizing, but viscerally, I almost pity my future nieces and nephews who will never have the opportunity to hold the crinkled paper images of their ancestors. It’s much like the arguments for and against e-books and audio-books. The portability of digital versions is obvious but there’s just something electric about the tangible feel of a book or photograph against your fingers.