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On my wall, I have a photograph of my grandmother at 12, with her parents and siblings. Theyre done up in silk dresses, handsomely arranged on chairs, unsmiling, with a confident 19th century papa strutting behind.
Its one of my treasures. I have thousands of other family photographs in boxes, some as recent as five years ago, others dating back more than 100 years. But our remembered family has reached its end. I'm taking digital pictures now, which future generations will never be able to see.
For all our modernity, we dont know how to keep digital photographs alive. Snapshots, to use an old-fashioned word, might yellow or even fade, if theyre not on good paper. But it takes a century for them to crumble (if they ever do) and copies of favorites are easily made. By contrast, the 0s and 1s of our computerized images degrade in just a few years. Even if you keep burning and reburning disks, technology will eventually outfox you. Your old disks wont fit in the new machines.
Some day, an interested great-grandchild might find my paper photos in a box in an attic and thumb through them, laughing at our queer clothes and the odd look of our cars. But what if all I have in the attic is a hard drive? No machine will be able to read what's on it. The photographs being taken of you at your current age won't be available in a few years, unles they're updated continually on new technology. Neither will the pictures you're taking of your children while they're young. Visible family history is likely to dribble away.
Its not just photographs. I have letters from my late husband, written to his mother when he was an 18-year-old pilot in World War II. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the warriors email and text. Unless their spouses or partners print out the emails and save them, no young child will ever know what the parent saw during the war and what he or she was feeling when lives were on the line.
Libraries are trying to preserve digital material, some of which already cant be read by the technology of today. While theyre thinking about it, they keep the chips, disks, cards and hard drives in climate-controlled rooms, hovered over by computer-savvy archivists.Those are definitely not the conditions in my attic.
I keep meaning to get photo paper and print a sampling of pictures that illustrate how we live now. But frankly, Im busy and it takes a lot of time. It even takes time to choose images for Flickr, Photobucket, or some other photo-sharing service. If I could only drop off my camera's memory card at a drugstore and have prints back in an hour, fitted neatly into yellow envelopes .
Families that lose their pictorial and graphic history lose their roots. Their heritage is as blank as if they had been adopted, with no trail. When the house of a friend of mine burned, the photos were the only loss she regretted and always mourned. Pictures are wellsprings of memory. Without them, whole years and events vanish from our minds.
I hope I'll get around to printing some of my digital pictures soon. I hope you will, too. It's a new obligation we have toward our descendents. Their sense of place lies in our procrastinating hands.
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