What do you do with old photographs: Misha Herwin

 

Time after time, when people are asked what they would save from a house fire, they say their family photos. Which, when you consider how rarely we look at them, seems odd. And yet in another way this makes perfect sense.

Those photos are more than pictures. They are memories. Mostly happy ones too. The bad times are rarely, if ever captured on film.

They remind us of who we were, what we looked like and what we did. And they make us smile.

They also link the generations. The grandchildren can see what parents and grandparents looked like when they were young and get a glimpse of what life was like back there in the dark ages. A photograph can also be a window into history. The only one I have of my grandfather is as a young man in uniform when he fought for Austria Hungary in WWW1.

I’ve spent the afternoon clearing out a box of old photographs. They are now sorted into categories and ready to be put into albums. An old fashioned way of storing them, but what else do you do?

Some I’ve scanned and will save on my hard drive, others might be put into frames, but there is not enough space on the shelves for most and those in my pictures folder won’t get looked at very often.

So there they will be, volumes and volumes, from when I was a baby onwards. There are pictures of the holidays we had, houses we lived in and animals we owned, or in the case of the cats, deigned to share our home. 

It’s a visual record of my life and of my children’s child and young adulthood. 

And one or two which are actually quite good photographs in their own right.