One of the guys I follow on Instagram posts nothing but what look to be scans of old found photos; the kind you run across in antique shops. I also spend way too much time visiting the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive. I love these voyeuristic glimpses into the past, especially the ones that record the most mundane of daily activities. While looking at scenes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, I often catch myself thinking, "Wow. That looks like something that I'd see in my family's photo albums."
When my mom and dad divorced in the 80s, they split up the family albums. There were lots of duplicates in my grandmother's collection that they threw into the mix to help ensure the split was mostly equitable, but not everything is in both sets of albums, and it has been my long term goal to get everything scanned and put back into a single unified virtual album that both my sister and I can have.
After Mom's passing, I started that project, but was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos involved in her collection I gave up and returned all the physical media to my sister.
About a year before Ben and I left Phoenix, I got the urge to revisit this project and made off with my dad's albums (with his permission, of course), intending to scan and return them within a couple months.
Like so many of these well-intentioned projects, life intervened and even this modest beginning was put on the back burner. Oh hell…it was shelved and pretty much forgotten about until Dad's passing a month ago when my sister started cleaning out his place and asked if I had them.
So a couple weeks ago I jumped back into it, and unlike times past, I have not given up. I'm nearly finished with Dad's albums and will swap them for Mom's when I see my sister in October. What struck me the most about all this is how so many of these photos really could easily appear on Retronaut or show up in that found-photos Instagram feed:
I'm also surprised at how well Photoshop is able to bring so many of these faded shots back to life. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's amazing. The original prints have been faded for so long that it's how they're burned into my memory, so in many cases it's like I'm seeing them for the very first time.
One of the saddest things about looking over all these photos is the realization that since neither my sister or I have children to inherit them, it's quite likely that all them will one day end up in an antique shop as mere curiosities of a time long gone.
Are you scanning each by hand, then cropping? Or have you found a semi-automated way of doing this? I have a huge chunk of photos I want to scan, but….
It is sad, yes, when an object's special meaning dies when the people who know die. A beloved object becomes a mere thing. Too bad they can't tell us their tales.
Wonderful post; that is all.
Kudos to you, Mark, it's a hell of a project. I've done the same thing, and added to it over the years. Hours and hours of work, and not all of the photos are salvagable. We had lots that were stuck together from moisture and just ruined. And those old Polaroids with the stiff backers, they won't press flat without bending. Oy! And after all of that work, I don't think I got much of a response from the family. Hope you get some attaboys for your efforts.
You are lucky to have these photos. A few months before my mom died, in Tucson, she had all, and I do mean all, the family photos destroyed. I did not care about anything else in the house, I just wanted the photos.