AMA 2, memory

From a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. "How does the experience of looking at an old photo for the first time in decades affect the memory of being there, the memory of looking at the photo, and compared to the images that are now taken?"

This is in the context of digitizing film negatives taken about 30 to 35 years ago. 

Memory can be a funny thing, especially in relation to both taking and looking at photographs. There's a bunch of stuff I want to talk about and will try to do so in an orderly way.

Let's start with fairly recent history, back when taking a photograph meant exposing film. For most people it might be an inexpensive point and shoot, or maybe an SLR. A pro photographer would use a high end SLR at the least, and more likely would use medium format. 

Let's stick with ordinary people. Film was available everywhere, and wasn't expensive. A roll would go in the camera and be exposed over the course of time. The whole roll might get exposed at one event, or the camera might be forgotten and it might take weeks, or even months to be fully exposed. 

Then the film would get dropped off at the lab. Modern readers might have trouble with this, but there used to be little kiosks at the entrance to mall parking lots, promising 1 hour photo developing. Every mall had a store like Blacks, where one could pay extra to have film developed and printed much quicker than the standard time of a week or so. Typically you could get prints of different sizes, surface textures, multiple copies, and probably more choices that aren't coming to mind at the moment. The stores also had cameras, accessories, frames, albums, and probably more stuff related to photography. 

You'd pick up your prints, eager to see them. We often sat on a bench just outside the store to look at them. An interesting thing happened, though most people weren't aware of it. I wasn't, at the time. We would compare our memories of the event to the photos, and would 'correct' any issues with the photo. It triggered a memory. As an example, I have several colour film photos of our car, a blue Honda Fit. It's a nice deep blue. 

Our car, on Portra 160 film. This film tends to somewhat pastel images.

Visions 3 film. A much more accurate colour, but being in bright sun and shade makes it hard to tell. I'm not about to trawl through many thousands of digital photos to see how the colour shows up. Because I don't have photos that include our car key worded to make them easy to find.

Even though we know the phrase "the camera never lies", we know it's not true. The amount of sunlight, the colour of any other light on the subject, the type of film, and the development chemicals and processing all determine how the print looks. Two photos of the same thing taken by different cameras at the same time could end up looking quite different. In the film age, we mentally corrected that. Even now we look at colour photos from the past, and think either "Good God people didn't actually wear that out in public did they?" or "Really, that colour?" We look at 'colourized' photos and movies, and most of them look horrible because we know those colours aren't right. 

Every photo you've ever seen has been edited somehow. Even in film days, drastic editing took place. One example is Soviet era photographs. There were people that specialized in removing people from photos, because it was inconvenient to the regime to acknowledge their existence. Now, of course, with digital photos and Photoshop anything can be done. At some point the image stops being a photograph in the sense that most people think of it, and become digital art. 

We had the experience a few times of looking at the prints and realizing we'd forgotten we'd taken photos of that event. Or that it had been so long since we put that roll of film in the camera. This is a nice rush of memory, since seeing the photo triggers other memories, hopefully happy, of that occasion.

There might be photos that someone else took with your camera that give you a different perspective on the event. There are several where both me and Linda are in the photo, meaning that someone else took it, and for the life of me I have no idea who. These can be a fun surprise, giving you a new memory to add to the old ones. This deepens and enriches the whole experience.

One of the things we tell new photographers is to look at the actual event with your eyes, not just through the camera viewfinder. We don't look at the world the same way through a camera, and sometimes we come back to the photos as strangers. We hear them say, "I don't remember taking that photo." Our brains and the camera see the world very differently.

Sometimes our memories get tangled up with the photo, and it's hard to make them align. Some of the photos taken on film show me with a beard, mostly a reddish colour. I remember having one at various times, but between May 1983, and August 1990 I had a job that required me to be clean shaven. All the guys that left that job grew a beard as an act of rebellion or something. Then about 1996 or so, my job required that I travel to gas plant turnarounds and I had to be clean shaven again. That lasted till 2007 or so. As a side note, at some point I grew a beard again during a month vacation in Nova Scotia and it was gross, with a white stripe from my lower lip down and under my chin. During the recent Vancouver Island trip I didn't shave for a week, and it was a repellent grey all over. Never again, I think.

So the photos with a beard have a clear date range. Except some of the other stuff in the photos doesn't jibe with my memories. I'm thinking some of them have to be mid 80's based on other evidence. Pity the resolution of the photos isn't good enough to read the date on the newspapers.

One of the photos I found was of me and a group of a dozen or so other people. I know the time and place, Pennsic in 1989. Maybe 1990 but I don't think so. In any case, it was a group of peers meeting to discuss changes to the rules governing the Society for Creative Anachronism. Some of my readers remember me being An Tir Kingdom Seneschal, and these were the seneschals of the other 11 (at that time) Kingdoms, and the Society Seneschal. 

Well. I remembered one name because I had dealt with her quite closely for years, and I still had contact information for her. All the others I was drawing a blank, though one name did eventually come to me. I didn't feel so bad when I shared the photos with my friend and she couldn't remember either. 34 years, after all. 

And yet these were people I hung out with for a week, exchanged extensive correspondence with before and after, worked with two of them on the Board, stayed with another for a visit to San Francisco and Sacramento. I still remember one of them introducing me to Fuzzy Navels, a potent but tasty drink. I spent much of that week after the formal meetings in a pleasantly alcoholic haze, never entirely sober, never falling down drunk, and not getting much sleep. I slept for the entire series of flights back. The flight attendants had to wake me up in Salt Lake City as they were checking the plane. I was taking up 3 seats at the back of the plane, between the engines. 

In the unlikely event of one of my readers knowing contact info for any of these people, please let me know. As a side note, it was great attending events in other Kingdoms as Kingdom Seneschal. You're an important guest, you get to know all the good gossip, but nobody expects you to actually do anything. Still, at one I contributed, mainly because then I got to wear the symbol of the organizing team.

Yes, those are Mickey Mouse ears. I figured it would be the only chance in my life to ever wear them. Never let it be said that I take myself too seriously.

There's another example. I've mentioned the really old negatives here. These date back to the early to mid 1950's. Maybe even very late 1940's. In lots of the photos we don't know for sure who the people are, mainly because we don't know exactly when the photo was taken. Complicating things is a strong family resemblance between sisters in two generations. I'm still hoping some of those older generation people take a good look and send me some notes.

My granny had the habit of writing names and ages on the back of photos, and at the time I didn't understand why. Now I do. We forget. The memory gets buried beneath other memories. There's a theory that we remember everything that ever happened to us, everything we see and hear, mainly. The problem is that we can't access it when wanted. There aren't enough associations to bring that thing to the surface. 

So in that group photo, for a week there was a strong association to those people. But when you don't see them, or lose contact, there's all the other people you meet. For me, there were jobs at a dozen or more firms, each with a new set of faces and names to remember. While cleaning out a drawer I found an old org chart. When reading the names I could mostly remember the people. But before that, if you'd shown me a photo of their face I'd have probably drawn a blank on their names. I'd probably get where we were working, but not always. I ran into the same people several times at different jobs. It's true, when you get near the top of the pyramid, you'll know, or know of everybody else there. Which is why you don't burn bridges leaving a job.

In my own current photography processing, I'm kind of lax, even knowing, KNOWING, that at some point I'm going to want to find that photo, and will be cursing myself because I forgot to keyword it, or didn't use the keyword that I now expect I would have used, or there was a keyword that wasn't important at the time of the photo and later does become important, but I didn't go back and add it. Like above, it would be mildly handy to see all the photos with our current car in them.

As I've been writing this, snippets of memory are surfacing. Two more names in the group photo, but they're SCA names, not the real names, and thus of little use tracking them down. The thought just occurred to me that some of those people might have died somehow. Health issues, demonstrations of driver incompetence, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, any number of things could have happened over that time.

So far, people have been delighted at seeing the old photos. I certainly have been, looking through the photos and negatives. Like these two photos. Obviously I know who the people are, but I have no clue which Christmas it was. It could be as early as 1984, or as late as 1989.

Yet you never know. Seeing an old photo might bring back unpleasant associations. No examples of that yet have happened to me, at least that I know about.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Peony

Tombstone

Two closely related photos, almost but not quite mergable into a panorama, but I don't think that was my intent. 

Film (new)

The South Glenmore Park pump track. I've been back several times and remain convinced there are images here. I just haven't composed them yet. Acros II film.

Film (old)

In the not taking myself too seriously department. This one also ties into what I was talking about above. The beard says very late 1990 to 1997. But the arrangement of furniture says mid to late 80's to me. But while I can't date the newspapers, the magazine on the left of the coffee table is a clue.

I did a bit of digging, and much to my amazement I found that issue of The Herb Companion in our library. It's from June/July 1993, titled Herbs for Growing, if you're interested in knowing. 

So what was I doing summer of 1993? I had recently started working at NOVA Gas Transmission, so this is a weekend, support by the newspapers strewn about. We used to like getting the papers on the weekend and read them while drinking coffee and waking up. I don't think the lattice and front flower boxes are there, and yet I thought I built them fairly early on in our home ownership. I still have that coffee table in the media room. The chair died at some point. The two love seat things are stashed in the garage, for potential use sometimes. The bookcase visible off to the right is one of a matching pair, they're down in the basement now, still loaded with books.