What is an album?? Do you remember your grandma’s bookshelf full of photo albums?
I do and I loved it when she or my mom started showing me them and telling me stories. I feel like this has been lost in the past of the years. We always have our phones in our hands or our pockets, so taking a picture is as easy as breathing.
This reason made us take more pictures than my mom did with her analogue camera, she had to take some pictures that didn’t know if she even liked and then go to a shop so they would reveal them and then she could see them, she couldn’t do this with only one photos roll, she had to wait until she had a few so it wasn’t that expensive, as she had to go to the village next to mine because we didn’t have a place where they revealed photos. I mean this whole process is much more effort than what we do now with our phones, but I feel like it was more original, having your own photo in your hands is amazing, you can keep them forever and nobody is going to take them from you. Instead of what we do have now, uploading all of them to the internet and maybe losing them if you don’t pay your subscription, however, we also have the chance to upload them to a hard drive, but I think this is not the most common thing.
She has lots of albums from when she was a teenager, then telephones came, and everything changed. I love that she wrote something about the day when the photo was taken behind it and now that maybe 30 years have passed, she can look at them and remember how she felt or anything about it. In different from the photos that normally we keep on the internet because a phone doesn’t have that much memory to store all of them.
Now I discovered some web pages where you can print 50 photos per month that you love for a fair price, and they send you those to your mailbox. I decided to do this every month a few years ago and now I have all my memories stored together and when I’m old I will be able to see them and touch them with my hands while I can read what I wrote behind them years ago as my mom does now with her teenager photos. I would like to show my children my pictures as my mom has been doing with me and my brothers.
I think this has become more popular in the past years as every time there are more web pages/apps that do this, some examples are Hoffman (with a discount code for 50 photos 3 euros, this month code: 50OCTHOF, only works with the app, you’re welcome) or Free prints. I know there are more, but these are the ones that I have used the most.
In conclusion, all trends come back, and I especially love this one, it’s so original. The album bum.
Digital technology allows a lot of extraordinary things, but as you show, it’s intangible. All our digital memory could someday disappear with a natural global disaster: global warming, magnetic solar storm, or whatever. We have digitised tons of old books and documents to make them more accessible and ironically we should now begin to rematerialise our (digital) collective memory so as not to lose it !