I took a course in college my senior year. It was decades ago. The class focused on communications. Computers were not on the desktop, cameras were film based, and telephones were analog with rotary dials. There was no Internet much less text messaging or cell phones. People still wrote letters on paper by hand. The other choice was a typewriter. It was not unusual to find people who did not know how to touch type.
The communications course was an unusual one for Harvard because it allowed lots of room for creativity. I decided to show people slides and see how much information they could gather without any verbal or written information. One of my roommates and I had just returned from a road trip to Alaska. The report for the course was not as easy to write as I hoped.
What was easy to predict was that someone who had visited a place or one similar to a photo gathered a lot more information from a photo than someone who had never been there. What surprised me is that my roommate and I had stored very different information about the same pictures. However, in general it is easy and not too surprising to say that people who have walked on beaches can draw more information from a beach picture than someone who has been landlocked all their life.
Hundreds of thousands of pictures later, I am still trying to take pictures which “capture the moment.” It is not an easy task. The lighting, the composition, the distance from the subject and the subject itself all have to be right to capture an image that stands on its own without commentary. A few years ago, I even went to the trouble of publishing a Kindle Book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year. The pictures that went into the book triggered memories for me. My wife, who helped edit the book, and I disagreed on some of the pictures which were chosen from over 100,000 images but usually I let myself win because I am the person with the closest connection to the pictures.
Even sixty years after a picture is taken, a picture has to be really good or have some written context to not be thrown away. Many good pictures today disappear today because they are only stored on a cell phone. They have no name, there is no back to write on, and the phone gets old and is thrown away. The lucky photos get put somewhere with a little more persistence than a cell phone that is going to be dead in three or four years.
Every time I go looking for a photo and find it in one of my many albums, I am thankful that I took the time to put it in an album. When I search by name and one of the photos that I have labeled comes up and turns out to be the right one, I am encouraged to keep labeling digital photos.
The closest that we can come to time travel is a photo that takes us back in time. As long as our memories remain strong, the narrative is not so important but at some point unless our narrative has been adopted by the next generation, the memories disappear and the photos can become meaningless especially as our landscapes are increasingly transformed by development.
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