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Some primitive tribes believed their souls could be stolen if they were photographed. Maybe those folks were on to something.
The contents of 50 photo albums lie strewn around me on the living room floor. At approximately 100 photos per album, that's a grand total of 5,000 photographs. There is a mountain of black-and-white and colour snapshots: of babies, birthday parties, vacations, christenings, weddings and a few funerals. The majority of them predate 2002, the year digital cameras became cheap and popular, and we started snapping away to our heart's desire and our memory card's capacity.
A box of sepia-toned photos dates back several generations, fading images of distant Eastern European relatives I've never met. When I visited a dear auntie in Montreal in the last decade of her life, she would open a little blue tattered suitcase, lovingly take out a photo and tell me all about the people in the picture. This uncle lost a leg in the First World War and never fully recovered from the trauma. That robust young woman could ride two horses at once, holding onto the reins as she stood balanced on the back of each horse. That wrinkled old widow worked in her vegetable garden wearing cabbage leaves as a hat to protect her from the hot summer sun.
Today, as I pore over the pictures I inherited from my auntie, I try to determine the value of each memory. Who is that person? Do I want to keep this photo? More often than not the backs are blank, or have writing in a script I can't decipher. Now that auntie is gone I wish I had noted at least the date of each picture. Should I throw them out? If they mean nothing to me, will my children care? Perhaps one day someone will ask: "Do you have a photo of Uncle Ivan?" I will then indulge in revisionist history and give them a snapshot of someone who looks like he could have been an Ivan.
When it comes to the more recent images, as often happens with families, the first-born child was deemed worthy of lots of photos. We have hundreds and hundreds of ordinary snapshots of our first-born. Did we really take a photo every time she burped, smiled or slept? Yes, we did.
My husband, the seventh of eight children, claims only a couple of dog-eared black-and-white photos that he can reliably identify as being of him. Since he and his three brothers all looked alike as kids, I think some of the photos are actually of his younger brother, but I don't want to disillusion him.
My goal – worthy, enormous and utterly time-consuming – is to make some sense out of all these photos since my husband and I plan to sail into retirement and possible relocation within the next five years. I will scan all of the best pictures onto a portable hard drive and give digital copies to each of our children and any other relatives who request them.
With rapid changes in technology that could threaten our future ability to access important data (floppy disks anyone?), I plan to keep the very best paper photographs in one big album – and carefully note all names and dates. As the unofficial family historian, I feel a certain responsibility to preserve our cherished memories.
I know what other bewildered yet sentimental families must be doing with their photos. They are renting personal storage units, which are popping up like mushrooms in the Vancouver rain. We are paying hundreds, even thousands, of dollars each year to protect memories that we may never have time to revisit.
So I begin my decluttering project by throwing out dozens of pictures. My daughter walks into the living room and shouts: "What are you doing?" I stop mid-shredding. Am I guilty of sanitizing our family history? Who made me the arbiter of good taste? Even the fuzzy photos may have their intrinsic value. Even the best memories may be flawed.
A friend recently e-mailed me a link to a website with a fascinating collection of rarely seen photographs. They were all very old, a little fuzzy but captivating. There was a photo of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab circa 1894; the 10- by 15-foot wooden shed where Harley-Davidson Motor Co. got its start in 1903; a lovely photo of three young women washing their clothes in New York's Central Park during a 1949 water shortage. The passage of time has infused them all with meaning.
When I first learned there were primitive tribes who didn't want their photos taken for fear of losing their souls, I thought it was some quaint phenomenon. Yet, as I do some serious soul-searching about what to keep and what to throw away, I will aim to emulate those nomads who picked up their most useful belongings and, without looking back, set out for a better place to live.
Roxanne Davies lives in North Vancouver.