1000 Words

I’m not a technophobe. I do use contemporary electronics. But I’m not a technophile either. I often prefer older methods. I prefer writing checks to making online payments, for example, as much as that increasingly annoys the companies issuing the bills, but I will pay electronically when necessary. The physical act of writing checks and then inking the amounts into a ledger instills a clear sense in my own head of those expenses and balances in a way I find satisfying – and eliminates the need constantly to look them up online. I prefer books printed on paper to e-readers. Sometimes particular titles are too pricy or inconvenient to acquire on paper in which case I will read them electronically. I prefer the drive-through window of the bank to the ATM though I will use the latter (rarely) after hours. I prefer the checkout counter with a human cashier to the self-checkout aisle, provided there are no long lines at the former. Some modern applications just seem odd to me though. The salesperson at the dealership where I bought my last car, for example, made a major point of telling me I can start the engine with my phone. I can’t imagine why I would want to do that. OnStar and even the manufacturer can start it remotely, too.
 
So, while modern tech is not always my first choice, I don’t shun it either. When the alternative is too slow or clunky (or just not up to the task) I’ll readily go digital. This is also the case with photographs. I do keep digital photos on my devices, and have scanned many old film photo prints for digital storage. Yet, I prefer physical photo albums to flash drive albums or the cloud. Perusing physical albums employs four of the five senses and thereby is more impactful. I’m not alone in feeling this way. Unexpectedly, this is one case in which the generations are upside down in their technophilia. It’s rare that I say this about any subject, but I’m with the Millennials on this one. A Chatbooks survey of 15,591 families found Boomers to be more OK with digital albums than Millennials and GenZ:
 
65% of Millennials prefer looking at printed photo albums vs. digital
62% of Gen X prefer looking at printed vs. digital
50% of Baby Boomers prefer looking at printed vs. digital
 
Physical private photo albums are remarkably effective at mood alteration, usually for the better. According to a study by Doctor of Psychology Peter Naish, looking at a family photo album was more effective at improving mood than music, TV, chocolate, or alcohol: 11% for the album compared to 1% for the others. It was better than wine for relaxation: 22% improvement vs 14%.

Physical albums are not just for solitary contemplation and reminiscence. The audience for them is small by design, but for that reason it is intimate. (There are such things as commercial albums, but the reference here is to private everyday albums stashed in the closets of everyday people.) They are intended to be shared with friends and family. Sharing an album is particularly good for passing along family lore. It is far better than stories alone: a kind of multimedia documentary. This requires, however, someone who knows the narrative well enough to tell it. Most albums are not well enough organized or annotated to speak for themselves. Mine are not. But I’m working on it.
 
At the moment I have three albums with only the loosest organization: 1) prior to 1950 (earliest pics are from the 1890s), 2) 1950-1969 (my mom was prolific with the Kodak in this era), and 3) 1970-present. Within each, the chronology is inconsistent and the notation sparse where it exists at all. In addition there is a box of loose photos of various ages and sizes; also there are 21^st century digital images stored on my hard and flash drives.
 
My plan is first of all to reselect what goes into the physical albums and what stays in the box or on the drives. It’s important to know what to exclude from an album so it isn’t daunting and unmanageable. If a family member played in Little League for instance (I didn’t) and there are hundreds of photos of the games, don’t include them all; no one – not even oneself – wants to examine all those. A page or two is enough. The remaining pics can go into a real or virtual box. There are, of course, some types of photos I wouldn’t include even if I had them. (Anyone who wouldn’t leave some significant things out of an autobiography hasn’t led a very interesting life and the same goes for photo albums.) The second task will be to rationalize the order of the pics within each book, making it chronological as much as possible. Finally, I need to whip up some terse but adequately informative written commentary to intersperse with the photo pages in order to explain the who, what, when, and where of the pics.
 
The reason for inserting written commentary? I’m the last living member of my immediate family so there is no one else to provide it. In the event the albums end up in someone else’s hands, they will be unintelligible without it. I do have cousins from both sides of the family who share some ancestors, but even for them most of the pics in the albums without my narrative will be what they are to strangers: contextless faces. This raises the question of for whom the albums are intended. (Besides myself, of course.) In her paper Looking at the Family Photo Album: a Resumed Theoretical Discussion of Why and How, Mette Sandbye (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen) writes:
 
“Family photo albums are about social and emotional communication, they can be interpreted as ways of understanding and coming to terms with life, and at the same time they document more sociological aspects of daily lives, that we do not have access to from other historical sources… While every family photograph adheres in some way to the rituals and conventions of a particular group of people in history (e.g. American and Danish urban middle-class family life in the 1970s, Japanese urban middle-class family life in the 2000s), we must also consider the physical materiality of each album and its individual images.”
 
In other words, family albums are not just personal keepsakes but historical documents that have some relevance for historians trying to reconstruct daily life in some time and place. Commentary helps. It’s a long shot anyone’s family album will end up in an archive somewhere for this purpose of course. In truth, mine are likely to end up in a trash bin eventually. But maybe not. On the off chance they don’t, I’ll name names and places. Meantime, the project (“project” might be too strong a word for something to which I attend so sporadically, a little bit at a time) prompts me to revisit old friends, many of whom exist only on images and in memory. It’s better than chocolate. I’m not so sure about alcohol.
 

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