The Lost Photo Album
Bear with me for the preamble. I have 3 girlfriends who I’ve known since our teens. At school, we called ourselves The A Team as our names (Inga, Shauna, Joanna and Louisa) all ended in A. We now have a WhatsApp group aptly named The A Team. It’s a wonderful, almost daily way to keep that friendship very much alive across two continents, 4 time zones and busy, complicated lives.
We’ve all had children whose names end in A (Mia, Amelia, Ella). For me, having only had boys, I have a nod towards continuity as Alexander, my youngest, is the masculine version of Alexandra - I’ll take that. Oh and I also have Alfie and a dog called Arlo so I’ve done my bit with the A’s.
I digress. Today, The A Team celebrates a rather auspicious occasion. The first of our offspring turned 18. Happy birthday Mia! Today, the friends who grew together from children to adults have created our very own, bonafide adult. It feels rather momentous (and also rather bloody old).
As I looked through my photo album to share a photo on said group chat of the four of us, at our shared 18th birthday party, I was struck by the thought of how these images define our memories. That double page spread evokes the most powerful memories of my 18th year. Sealed behind plastic covers, the full 365 days that defined the year I reached adulthood is locked forever by a few dated images.
As our lives progress and the adventures just keep coming, more and more memories fight for space in our crowded brains. As age starts, oh so slightly, to erase memories to make room for new ones or leave old ones a little shaky around the edges, our photo banks are the concrete affirmation of the lives we lived.
I read recently that the digital age is stealing our photos to phones and tablets and a whole generation of images are going to be lost as tech becomes redundant, outdated with images not transferred. We’re guilty as charged of barely printing a single photo today.
A creative girlfriend of mine gave herself a mission to create albums for her babies. Tucked away in rural Cornwall, she dedicated a whole year (to be fair, there wasn’t much else to do), doing her bit to preserve and thus define her children’s own early memories. I think of her often when I scrabble to find an early image of one of my boys - trawling through page after page of photos on ICloud (yes, yes, I know I should create online albums but who really does?) rather than simply picking up a beautifully bound album and easily finding said image.
My sons laugh at how dated this practice already feels. But to me, I cherish these albums. The well thumbed pages fall open to reveal page after page of terrible 80’s hairstyles. I can almost smell the rather pungent inside of a single man tent that took me around Europe. Who even goes on a cross channel ferry anymore? But I have plenty of windswept shots on the outside decks from school trips to France.
As photo albums become a relic of the past, I do wonder how our memories will be shared to the future? Will there be a gap in my life when I can, like Louise, spend a year downloading and creating a few more photo books? Are these images forever banished to being seen behind a screen rather than within bound books? Who knows. But I do know I’ve preemptively determined my first new year resolution of 2019!