I have been immersed in a photo-organization project for the past week plus. This is what I feel like I’ve been immersed in:
OK, what this photo really is, is an oil well blowout in Coalinga, CA, in November, 1998, and the reason I can tell you that and show you this photo is because I have been sorting photographs from 1985 to sometime in 2003 when I went digital. I scanned a few, such as this one, into the computer. Right now, I think I’ll scream if I look at another photo, and I’m not finished yet. So listen and learn from my mistakes. And this post will have something to do with the Creative Every Day January theme of BODY, I promise.
For years, I mean, YEARS, I’ve been thinking that I need to organize the photos, and maybe five years ago I got them into boxes labeled with the year at least. But then we make photo boards for all kinds of occasions, and after extracting dozens of photos to copy for the boards, I’d just toss them in the closet. This is what I mean by a photo board – my husband surprised me with this on my 60th birthday.
At Costco recently, I saw nifty containers for storing photos – a plastic case with 12 smaller cases inside. All acid-free and all that. They look like this.
And this is how many I have filled.
Eleven. All individual compartments labeled with contents and date, and all cases numbered, and an excel document cataloging what is in each case. Because if I was going to do this thing, I was going to do it right.
Well. Do you think I dated any of those photos on the back? Or wrote what the occasion was? I had to become a detective. I should have been wearing the Sherlock Holmes hat I bought when I was teaching and wanted to teach students how to investigate a subject. Alas, I was hatless, but still investigating. Bless my mother-in-law – SHE dated and labeled photos! And occasionally she’d give some to us. So I had to match hairstyles, clothing, etc., to try to figure out what month of what year I was in and who was who.
And do you think I ever threw the bad photos away? Or the duplicates? There was even a time when developers were giving you triplicates whether you wanted them or not. Wastebasket after wastebasket-full went into the trash.
Our Christmas letters were a big help. Since 1981 I’ve been writing a lengthy Christmas newsletter – it’s grown to 8 pages (two are all photos) in a newsletter format. They make a great family history. So I’ve been reading and re-reading – what year was Kim in Annie Get Your Gun? When did we spend Christmas in Yosemite? You get the idea.
I swear there are photo gnomes rearranging these things when no one is looking. Today I had a big stack, well, one-inch maybe, of photos in my hand from when I was in Sweet Charity and Finnian’s Rainbow. I can’t tell you the years because I hadn’t gotten that far. I put them down, did something else, turned back, and they had vanished. I backtracked and they are just plain nowhere. I really hope they aren’t in the trash. Those gnomes have been wreaking havoc in the boxes in the closet, too. Somehow the wrong years had gotten into the wrong boxes and the wrong photos had gotten into the wrong envelopes. And sometimes the negatives don’t even match with the photos!
Finally, I said ENOUGH! I’m done for now. I have a stack of photos about 15″ long still to sort, but they are going to have to wait. I am photoed out. I’ll do them within the next few weeks, however, because all those plastic containers are staying on the bedroom floor until I am done. And all I can say is my kids better appreciate this and be interested in family history some day!
LESSON: and this goes for print as well as digital – date, label, and organize. DLO. D-LO. However you want to say it, just do it. This has been consuming me – I haven’t journaled, read, done any art, nothing. Well, ok, I have done some bike rides (the rainbow blog) and the Martin Luther King breakfast (the Fannie Lou Hamer blog), and the Shadow art journal page, etc. but I haven’t read other people’s blogs nor commented. I didn’t even watch American Idol!
I’m going away. Really, I am – going up to the cabin on Tuesday to spend five days all alone thinking and doing other things. Writing, art, reading, guitar hero, or nothing. They’ll be so much snow I’ll be cabin-bound but that’s ok. I’ll miss Adam Lambert on Ellen but we’ll Tivo. My husband is going to drive me up because try as I may, I can’t get chains on the car myself.
I wrote an article on eHow that may help you if you aren’t sure how to organize digital photos. I almost got in trouble there too, but luckily I wised up before I had too many years to sort out. That was its own nightmare.
Consolation: we’ve had beautiful skies the last couple of days. I’m sorting by the balcony so I can look out and see the lake, ducks (we had some cormorants today), and clouds. This was yesterday.
Just mesmerizing. I could watch clouds all day.
We get these beautiful skies in January and February – that’s all. So I cant’ stop looking. And today, when driving out to visit my parents, I backtracked to take a photo of this building. It’s an old Quonset hut I pass all the time, but there’s been so much rain this week that there was a wonderful reflection.
Remember, always have your camera with you so you can take advantage of unexpected moments.
So I promised I’d relate this post to the CED January theme – Body. It’s about your body of work. One of the most important bodies you have. Whether you are an artist, photographer, writer, collector, whatever it is you do – keep it in order! I’m going to upload some new photos to my website this week so my BODY of work will be more complete. I know what’ll happen if I wait too long.
So – happy organizing!
