Category: Creative Life

While finishing the first draft of Book II of my memoir I set the photo project aside. In between now and when I turn the first spade of soil, I plan to organize the “Life of Photos” project so it can advance when there is time available. A couple of things.

I seek to bring order to my large collection of physical and digital photographs. The purpose is twofold. There are practical matters of archiving other than in a shoe box, album, or digital file folder. Digital is straight forward here: Make multiple copies: one to edit and work on, and one or two that are not touched and serve as backup in the cloud and on a physical drive. The other purpose is trickier. What is the culture and its underlying philosophy of value. When the editing process finishes, what work product will be left? At present, that is an open question, the answer to which lies in the work ahead. At a minimum, there will be some slide shows, easy to navigate digital archives, photo albums, and use of photographs on this blog.

The software Paint.NET will be the first attempt at editing software. It is available for free and if I want, there is a version with Microsoft support for a nominal fee. The types of edits are not complicated: cropping, renaming, and some minor restoration. Paint.NET should handle that.

We recently found photos in an album we made in 1986 were coming loose — all of them. We started a project using a different kind of adhesive, and found it was soaking into the paper too much. We stopped and evaluated. For this project, and for any other similar ones going forward, we expect to use archival corners to re-attach the photos into the same album from which they came loose. For new albums, we will add consideration of the kind of paper used. The cultural challenge is in addition to fixing old photo albums, answering the question what other kinds of collections belong in a physical album. Some potential answers: narratives about our lives together are important. Any final work product would support old and to be developed narratives. Photography can also be art, so some of the best may find their way into other media or into a frame which could be hung on the wall.

Our family use of photography increased significantly in the 1950s. When digital photography began in this century, especially after 2012, it was Katy bar the gate. Photography became less ritualized with posed photographs on special occasions, and more a complete, undisciplined explosion of digital images with less thought and process in how they were taken. The goal of my project is to bring intentionality back into the process of taking and storing old photographs.

Our child said we should caption all the photographs so they could refer to the captions and understand the images when we are gone. There is more to it than that. Narrative context, personal reflection, and accessibility become equally important with captioning. Given the thousands of images, being thorough and doing it right could be challenging. In solving this, I expect embedding some of this information in the structure will be important if I can figure out how to do it. I don’t mean returning to photographs and entering metadata in every image. Instead, combinations of albums, folders and slide shows that tell our stories can be a structural framework. Short version: memory needs structure to survive the abundance of images. The project includes defining what that means.

While my personality is pretty cut and dried, a rational guy with a project like this, the work needs to develop what wings it can to fly into my and the viewers’ imaginations. Will it be emotional when I look at photos of my long deceased father? I wouldn’t admit it but probably.

This is a turning point in the project. Now begins programming work blocks into my already busy schedule, followed by doing the work. Once I get into the project I need to set several interim goals for the work products. When will the project be finished? I will need goals for that as well. The sooner I can call it “done,” the sooner I can devote time to other new projects.

Are photographs reality or not? My answer is yes, they are, despite all the self-aggrandizing selfies on the internet. Are artificial intelligence images reality? Yes, and are distinct from photographs. Is time spent off the internet reality? Yes, and not distinct from time spent on the internet. If it is possible to evaluate photography in light of the internet and artificial intelligence, we should. However, I believe we will have the same outcome, that all of it is a form of reality.

My belief runs against the pundits who say we should limit the amount of time we spend on the internet. If it is all a form of reality, then what does it matter that a person spends an equal amount of time sleeping, on the internet, and off the internet? There is a case to be made we shouldn’t worry about addiction to the internet. There is also a case to be made that we should. What I know is I need my daily trail walks to breathe fresh air and clear my thoughts while getting needed exercise. I mostly disconnect from the internet when I walk. If I see something that might make a good photograph, I take out my handheld computer, take some shots, and post the best image on social media.

From time to time, I enjoy getting out old photographs printed on paper. They convey a reality I experienced, although a focused aspect of it that hides much of what life was then. I used the photo below on the cover of my autobiography. It’s me standing on the back porch of the duplex where Mother brought me home from being born at a nearby hospital. I don’t recall her taking this photograph, yet I do recall a lot about living here. In particular, I remember the point at which memory began when confronted about something in the recent past I could not remember. This photograph serves as a mnemonic device.

Another type of photograph is the “artistic” one. That is, I took it as a form of creative endeavor with a specific intended outcome. For example, when I first got my Minolta SRT-101 camera, I drove my Volkswagen microbus out to the Coralville Reservoir and took photographs of the vehicle. Someone was with me as there were posed photos of me next to the bus. Those images stand distinct from the “artistic” photographs which were my main intention on the trip. Artistic photographs are a separate genre, one in which I have very little activity in 2025.

I have taken a lot of photographs to capture something about an event.

Like my early printed photographs, this one is a mnemonic device to recall that day in Indianola. The big Harkin Steak Fry had been in 2007 when six presidential candidates stood together on the stage just prior to the First in the Nation Iowa Precinct Caucuses that selected Barack Obama as the party’s nominee. Over the years, I captured a lot of politicians in photographs. These types of posed photographs are ubiquitous in social media. I’ve forgotten more than I remember about politics and these images help me re-live those experiences.

Are photographs posted on social media a throwaway? Often we take a photograph solely to post it on social media. It becomes a way of defining who we are. It also controls our self-image. For example, I rarely post a selfie, yet they are important in defining an “online presence.” I have been very bad at defining a self-image, which is why I don’t take or post many selfies. I could work on it, the way I worked on my restless nights to get better sleep, but why would I want to spend that time when everything, sleeping, waking, on the internet and off the internet are part of the same reality?

I may have more to say about how the internet changed photography. I need to study up, and that will take time. In the meanwhile, I plan to continue to take the kinds of photos I do and hope I won’t ruin them with too much study. Photography has become an important part of my reality.