Once upon a time, my dad took a million pictures. Even in the days of 36-exposure rolls of film, he stood there and used up half a roll at the Grand Canyon. Or the Brighton Pavilion or some beach in BC.
I became the holder of all these slides. My sister mailed me something like 4 or 5 moving boxes full of carousels of slides. Years and years ago! Eventually I got my dad's projector, too, so I can watch them easily.
The task was enormous and way more time-consuming than I had originally thought, and I ignored it for quite a while. We have a system now, and I have also hardened my heart so that I don't keep all those pictures of the Grand Canyon -- just the ones with my mom, or the rare ones she took of him! I must say that the family camping trips and so on keep getting put to the bottom of the pile because I know they will have lots of keepers!
We have a frame and a holder and we take a picture of the slide with a close-up lens, and then keep the real gems in archival boxes. If no one opens those boxes in the next 50 years they will self-destruct.... if only!
The ones I don't scan, I put in that bin if they have paper frames. One day I will finish the lampshade I once started.
Some have plastic frames, and they get just thrown in the garbage! I still can't believe I do that, but I have indeed thrown away thousands of pictures of Canadian university campuses in the 60s, pretty autumn-leaf colour in New England, waves crashing on beaches and Italian Renaissance architecture.
My mom and sister in Stanley Park in Vancouver, sometime like 1972... Note the groovy poncho my mom made. I had a purple one.
In one box of slides of a trip on a sailboat through the Queen Charlottes, there's one slide of the golden spruce on Haida Gwaii. If you fine that picture, you should keep it because some nut cut the tree down, and it was a treasure.
ReplyDeleteI sent you the boxes of slides when we moved to this house. That was in 2010, so only 9 years ago. It might have been in 2009 …?