Why We Make Home Videos, thought-provoking article by DP.
"I'm telling you, these tapes are INCREDIBLE. My wife and children wander up to my attic office, spot whatever movie is currently importing, and they're just goggle-eyed. We'd completely forgotten what we used to look like, how we used to talk. Our lives are so full, we barely recognize some of the places we've been and the experiences we've had."
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4 comments:
I have the family's slide's and the slide show projector from the 50's. Almost impossible to set up and watch. You have to be careful not to burn the slides with the projector.
The shift we have seen goes way beyond the teck. It is a lost philosophy. When I was a child in the 50's the entire neighborhood would come to the house an a weekend evening and look at the slides projected on a silly 6' white screen. Long gone.. When I inhereted the screen, projector and slides at the turn of the century the color was gone from the slides, the screen was yellowed to the center. The projector still worked fine but the slides were so brittle that you could only show them for seconds. And when the projector bulb burns out where do you turn?
That was only 50 years ago teck. Thought then was that it would last forever. In this day 10 year old cameras, computers and programs are obsolete.
I'm told that the external hard drive I am using will be history in 4 years,
Film prints look better to me all the time....
Visiting my friend one summer as a kid, his family had a slide show of pictures taken in the 50's and 60's. They were just street shots but I was amazed by the fashions. Here was living history and I made a mental note to try and shoot stuff that was just 'ordinary' so that my kids could marvel at it in the future.
Sorry to bang on about this but,
"The unexamined life is not worth living," wrote Thoreau.
is attributed to a plagiarist (if Thoreau did write it). Socrates said it first. Maybe it's an American thing to try and attribute all great achievements to Americans; according to Hollywood, they won the second world war single handed.
Something similar occurred to me recently (here). I realised that *nothing* looks the same in my childhood neighborhood, but even though I photographed a lot in my teen years, I don't have any prints of how the normal things looked.
"From time to time, I write about data rot: the distressing tendency of our recordings and computer files to become inaccessible as it's orphaned by new technology."
Come back copy editors: all is forgiven!
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