My parents wedding album! Yikes, some scary stuff in there. Who knew my real Dad was Tom Selleck? To write about such a mustache would surely require several chapters, so I’ll put that aside for now.
When I found their album, I knew there were a few things that would naturally be different compared to wedding photographs today. There are more than two sides to this, maybe you can tell me which one is better…?
When you only had 20 or so images in your album you knew these were important people, your family, close friends. They weren’t diluted by a bunch of similar or lesser images, so they naturally meant more to you – they were one of a kind. Compared to today, where many couples will be thrown thousands of images on a disk and that’s that. Good luck with the rest! I don’t know if you’ve ever sat with even 100 individual prints in front of you? It’s a lot of photographs! If you’ve got a thousand or so, most people just feel overwhelmed. Is the content compelling enough in the first place? If you can’t say it in 20-30 images, I’m not sure another thousand will do you much good, but that’s another topic…
But what information is in these 20 photographs? I think most will agree very little, or at least very little beyond the surface. Almost all of them will be group photographs, outside the church or similar, everyone stood in a line, trying to smile. Or maybe one with you poking a knife in a cake, or stood somewhere that in someone’s uncreative mind made a good photograph. The point is, they’re all posed, unnatural images, and really only show us the clothes people were wearing, who the family was, and possibly where they were. Not to say that 30 years ago photography wasn’t a bold and emotive art form, but in the capacity of weddings, it’s safe to say it was quite far from that. So today an image should tell you a lot more than simply what clothes you were wearing… otherwise, what’s the point?
A different generation would have had images printed and put into an album simply because this was really the only way to view them, unless you put the odd couple in a frame (let’s not mention projectors, I don’t want to bring back any repressed memories for anyone). But as life moves on, framed images usually get replaced by baby photos, generations that have passed, and so on. You never replace your wedding album, it’s something that is instantly viewable in front of you. No start-up. No clicking “next”. It’s future proof. But today when you’re given those thousands of images from your wedding on a CD, and you feel overwhelmed, what really happens with them? They go in the draw. Become dusty. Never looked at.
Do you think we’ve progressed? I don’t take the nostalgic view, as it wasn’t better in every area in the past. Nor do we have everything worked out perfectly today, but I think it’s useful to look to the past in order to better understand what will really work out well not only today, but long into the future.
In short: the “good enough” approach of simply having lots of images on a computer isn’t the route I take with my personal photographs.
