by Pamela Harazim
Come, look with me inside this drawer,
In this box I've often seen,
At the pictures, black and white,
Faces proud, still, serene.
I wish I knew the people;
These strangers in the box,
Their names and all their memories
Are lost among my socks.
I wonder what their lives were like.
How did they spend their days?
What about their special times?
I'll never know their ways.
If only someone had taken time
To tell who, what, where, when,
These faces of my heritage
Would come to life again.
Could this become the fate
Of the pictures we take today?
The faces and the memories
Someday to be tossed away?
Make time to save your pictures,
Seize the opportunity when it knocks,
Or someday you and yours could be
The pictures in the box
In this box I've often seen,
At the pictures, black and white,
Faces proud, still, serene.
I wish I knew the people;
These strangers in the box,
Their names and all their memories
Are lost among my socks.
I wonder what their lives were like.
How did they spend their days?
What about their special times?
I'll never know their ways.
If only someone had taken time
To tell who, what, where, when,
These faces of my heritage
Would come to life again.
Could this become the fate
Of the pictures we take today?
The faces and the memories
Someday to be tossed away?
Make time to save your pictures,
Seize the opportunity when it knocks,
Or someday you and yours could be
The pictures in the box
I found the poem here
Sitting at my desk I am haunted by the relatives silently waiting for me to pull out their photo and identify them. Many will become unidentified, and as time passes the chance of identification will disappear, and so will the photo.
I am, amazed, in awe of, and depressed by, the volume of photos in this room. There are 2500 slides from the Bresser side and I have about the same. There are boxes and boxes of actual photos, unsorted, no information printed on the back. Then there are all the digital photos in my computer, currently 7096. Many are scans of existing photos.
My next project will be to scan some of the old Bresser, DeBlaauw photos and negatives, and try to identify who is staring out at me.
In the past photos were expensive, and they were usually taken at special occasions. The person would wear their best clothes, making dating by clothing styles, or events in their lives possible. As photography
became less expensive, photos were taken at random, making dating next to impossible. The digital images have cured that problem, but at the risk of a fragile existence, with computer or disk failures.
My parting advice is, be very aggressive deleting digital photos when you download from your camera to your computer, and caption everyone. Captioning them, will help you delete.
And BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.
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