I have this huge modern age aversion to organizing my photos. I’ll do it, but my back has to up against the wall, whether pictures are busting out of their development envelopes like in the good old days of film, or in this case, my iCloud is full and I need to backup or pay for larger storage. I loathe this task. The last time I did it was in 2018 if that is any indication of my aversion. I have 8000 photos from the last 5 years that need (and indeed have) a home to land in that is not cloud based.

This task brings up all kinds of existential questions for me. What if I put these pictures on my external hard drive and no one ever looks at them, again? I went through the majority of my parent’s photo albums when we were clearing out their house in 2021 and honestly, most of the albums ended up in the trash. My dad took a lot of photos on long work trips of the process of putting up electrical lines across the western U.S. After looking at so many, you get the idea of what was involved and don’t need to sift through the whole box to discover any more. It was a core memory for him though and when we drove across Colorado and moved him to Utah, he was actively reminiscing about that process and I had no doubt that even given his decreased mental state, he did play a part in electrifying that portion of I-70. Obviously it held meaning for him, but what of our future generations will a box full of the same photos of strangers and heavy equipment mean to anyone else? Maybe being a nomad for so long made me less sentimental about holding onto things. Clearing out their house did the same for me. But life captured on a phone is somehow different in my brain.

So now I’m cataloguing our photos of the long traveling journey and some of the time before that up until present day, I’m not going to make physical albums or hang photos everywhere like I have done in the past. They were memories made and reminders of fun times had, but I documented the journey right here in this blog and on social media, I got what I needed out of it, it’s time to free up the space on my phone to make space for new moments that call for documentation. For someone like me who needs those visual cues of what I was doing in September of 2020 for example, removing pictures from my phone feels like I’m erasing my memory. Same goes for emails and texts but those have to be archived or deleted as well. For someone whose family member has dementia this feels very sensitive and tender and if I put that memory somewhere else, will I ever go to access it again? What if I forget?

I was talking about this whole photo conundrum with a neighbor a few months ago, how when we were growing up our parents took photos 12 or 24 at a time over a span of several months or a year. They were documenting the really special moments or highlights of a trip. They’d come home and get the film developed and put the pictures in an album or a box, this didn’t even happen all the time. Sometimes the film never even made it to the developer. My family didn’t have videos or need to be archivists to document family life. Once a year portrait studios were more my mom’s jam. In my own little family Natalie was born on the end of the film era, so she has several albums I put together when I was more diligent and less over documenting of her early years. Camden came in 2010, well into the digital age, and he has maybe one or two physical albums to take into adulthood, the rest of his early years are on CDs that where can you even go to look at anymore, or on Facebook which will that even be relevant to look at in his future. It’s so strange how quickly everything changed once we all had cellphones and the ability to take millions of photos and videos of every little thing.

I guess in summary I’m realizing I need to treat my unused photos a little more blasé and with a little more detachment. They are not the be-all-end-all part of an experience, like if I didn’t take the picture did it even happen? Yes, I get enjoyment out of the process of documenting, but if the archival process is going to be such and arduous chore, maybe I can edit a little more along the way and not go five more years ignoring, dancing around, and subverting this notice…