I feel the same way! I've pared down most of my possessions over the years, even books, but I still have thousands of printed photos and hundreds of letters. My dream for old age is to sit on a porch and spend my days re-reading those letters and looking at pictures.
As a street photographer I shoot a lot of photos and I always feel like there's too many in my archives for anyone else to ever go through and enjoy it. I have done a really poor job at separating a special selection of them. But I did recent print a photo book of the last year of my family events. It was a really awesome challenge to go through the archives and pick only the most important ones to print the full year on 80ish pages. I really want to do the same for my most special street photos next.
You should!!! I have purchased a number of hard cover books of street photos & love them. Two of mine are New York City & Pittsburgh & they truly are tome capsules of fashion & change…
I live in Zambia, where there's no postal delivery service to people's homes. We can rent a PO Box, but the nearest one is 10 miles from us. So it's email or no mail for us.
I sold all of my Canon & Hasselblad film gear +darkroom equipment back in the mid eighties. Picked up digital photography 20 years later. I do landscape/still life/fine art photos and have always felt that the only way I can truly express my message is with a print. In addition, I draw & do pastels. It wouldn't be too excessive to say that I'm a paper junkie. I just love a blank sheet of 100% cotton w/a nice texture (& maybe an elegant watermark). You can get some wonderful results w/high end fine arts prrinters on luxurious watercolor papers.
I love printing my photos on my Canon Selphy photo printer on post card stock and leaving them places to be found. I hope they are used by someone to send a message of love friendship or some uplifting words. Try it some time.
I relate to the feel of paper and the smell of ink in freshly printed photobooks, Andy! Incidentally, I was at the SFABF this past weekend and truly enjoyed it. In our digital world, where so much happens on screens, seeing that many book lovers gather and appreciate physical objects, printed matter and the book form was so reinvigorating. Todd Hiddo was briefly there. Did anyone else here go to the SFABF?
I was there too! I agree it was a pleasure to be amongst the books and ephemera. I have no more room in my small house for books yet I couldn’t resist coming home with more.
I couldn't agree more with this. In my opinion and practice, the print is the object. The "thingness" of it, as you say, is really important in getting people's attention and in saying what I want to say. I'm currently working on a portrait project with historic preservation tradespeople. Given what they do, it somehow feels wrong when I have to show the project electronically to possible subjects or funders. I make inkjet prints from digital captures, but even making those prints allows me to feel a little closer to my subjects.
Your article also makes me think about what happens to my archive, physical and digital, after I'm gone. Will anyone care enough to preserve it it? Why should They? We have no children and our niece and nephews will probably look at most of it once on the way to the nearest dumpster. Sorry to be so negative but its a real problem for many of us.
I love this and I totally get it. Digital minimalism is everywhere and it truly has changed our interactions with media so much. It used to take up space, now it exists in the cloud and is forgotten really easily. I used to create yearly photo albums, during the pandemic I somehow stopped because I barely took any pictures. I've promised myself to go back to that and create one for the last few years.
Print is ALWAYS the ultimate goal- even for someone like myself who can neither afford to have prints made, nor has the room to make them. At least self publishing now affords one the opportunity to produce some manifestation of the print form in books and zines.
And after decades of collecting photo books, I was quite happy to donate them to a photo library where they will now be seen, appreciated and shared.
I sooo get this. Every time I get a beautiful ecard from some thoughtful person, I realize it will never be able to go into a keepsake box so that I can look at it over the next 20-30 years. Nor will my kids or grandkids, like I did, finding the love letters that went back & forth between my grandmother & grandfather when he was on a war ship at war! They were kept, tied with a ribbon in a pretty tapestry box she had in her bedroom along with exchanged photos.
Our future families are robbed of all of this by technology.
And book reading. I own a Kindle, yes. But I own a entire library of books that I can curl up with at night, feeling the pages as I turn them & getting that book smell!
Propped up in bed at night while snow flies outside, reading a book & a big mug of hot chocolate steaming on my night stand.
I send out hard copy Xmas cards every year & remarkably, my friends send the same back to me…
I get the handwritten notes thing. I still write my grandmother fairly regularly because she loves it. I also find that because we default to digital, the few physical things I get increase in their specialness.
You make me wonder if I should get into scrap booking or some version of printing photos from the past year each year so I have them to look back on... Something kin to a visual journal.
I lost 10 years of digital photography in a computer/backup nightmare. I am very thankful for all the hard copy stuff that I have and the picture cd's that I made and my addiction to film photography. I also find that little postcard pictures really appeal to the public. They like to take home little momentoes as do I.
I have a similar passion for the tactile, ephemera, paper things. My career took me deep into the world of digital starting in the late 1990s, but I still yearn for the days of analog. Paper, dials, mechanicals, the weight of the camera, the touch of the film. I love your idea of shifting back into postcard writing. There's no reason why we can't reintroduce ourselves and our communities to all things paper! :)
I’m no photographer but I’m definitely a lover of paper. I started printing my daughter’s photos when she was born and have created scrapbooks. It’s hard to keep up with it but I just want her to have what I had. The ability to find an old picture, take it out of the book and frame it or share with friends. I also collect photography books and postcards. It’s fun to look back on some of the old postcards I collected when I was younger and remember what my interests were back then. I just started finding PenPals so it’s nice to share (thin out) my collection.
This! “ For better or worse, we appear to have lost our collective appreciation for the thingness of photography.”
I’ve been telling people I want to bring back scrapbooking in the sense of putting physical photos all in a scrapbook.
Digital collections don’t do it for me. I wanna touch em
Absolutely!
I feel the same way! I've pared down most of my possessions over the years, even books, but I still have thousands of printed photos and hundreds of letters. My dream for old age is to sit on a porch and spend my days re-reading those letters and looking at pictures.
As a street photographer I shoot a lot of photos and I always feel like there's too many in my archives for anyone else to ever go through and enjoy it. I have done a really poor job at separating a special selection of them. But I did recent print a photo book of the last year of my family events. It was a really awesome challenge to go through the archives and pick only the most important ones to print the full year on 80ish pages. I really want to do the same for my most special street photos next.
You should!!! I have purchased a number of hard cover books of street photos & love them. Two of mine are New York City & Pittsburgh & they truly are tome capsules of fashion & change…
I think you would enjoy my latest photography book "Love Letters: a Catharsis" which addresses all of the issues you discuss above –
https://www.blurb.com/b/12039100-love-letters
I'm check it out. Thanks, Mark!
I live in Zambia, where there's no postal delivery service to people's homes. We can rent a PO Box, but the nearest one is 10 miles from us. So it's email or no mail for us.
I appreciate that. And I also appreciate that you are reading my newsletter from the other side of the world. Thank you, Richard!
I sold all of my Canon & Hasselblad film gear +darkroom equipment back in the mid eighties. Picked up digital photography 20 years later. I do landscape/still life/fine art photos and have always felt that the only way I can truly express my message is with a print. In addition, I draw & do pastels. It wouldn't be too excessive to say that I'm a paper junkie. I just love a blank sheet of 100% cotton w/a nice texture (& maybe an elegant watermark). You can get some wonderful results w/high end fine arts prrinters on luxurious watercolor papers.
Jon Buchbinder
I love printing my photos on my Canon Selphy photo printer on post card stock and leaving them places to be found. I hope they are used by someone to send a message of love friendship or some uplifting words. Try it some time.
I relate to the feel of paper and the smell of ink in freshly printed photobooks, Andy! Incidentally, I was at the SFABF this past weekend and truly enjoyed it. In our digital world, where so much happens on screens, seeing that many book lovers gather and appreciate physical objects, printed matter and the book form was so reinvigorating. Todd Hiddo was briefly there. Did anyone else here go to the SFABF?
I was there too! I agree it was a pleasure to be amongst the books and ephemera. I have no more room in my small house for books yet I couldn’t resist coming home with more.
We missed each other. Gee, I did buy way too many beautiful books as well!
I couldn't agree more with this. In my opinion and practice, the print is the object. The "thingness" of it, as you say, is really important in getting people's attention and in saying what I want to say. I'm currently working on a portrait project with historic preservation tradespeople. Given what they do, it somehow feels wrong when I have to show the project electronically to possible subjects or funders. I make inkjet prints from digital captures, but even making those prints allows me to feel a little closer to my subjects.
Your article also makes me think about what happens to my archive, physical and digital, after I'm gone. Will anyone care enough to preserve it it? Why should They? We have no children and our niece and nephews will probably look at most of it once on the way to the nearest dumpster. Sorry to be so negative but its a real problem for many of us.
I love this and I totally get it. Digital minimalism is everywhere and it truly has changed our interactions with media so much. It used to take up space, now it exists in the cloud and is forgotten really easily. I used to create yearly photo albums, during the pandemic I somehow stopped because I barely took any pictures. I've promised myself to go back to that and create one for the last few years.
Print is ALWAYS the ultimate goal- even for someone like myself who can neither afford to have prints made, nor has the room to make them. At least self publishing now affords one the opportunity to produce some manifestation of the print form in books and zines.
And after decades of collecting photo books, I was quite happy to donate them to a photo library where they will now be seen, appreciated and shared.
I sooo get this. Every time I get a beautiful ecard from some thoughtful person, I realize it will never be able to go into a keepsake box so that I can look at it over the next 20-30 years. Nor will my kids or grandkids, like I did, finding the love letters that went back & forth between my grandmother & grandfather when he was on a war ship at war! They were kept, tied with a ribbon in a pretty tapestry box she had in her bedroom along with exchanged photos.
Our future families are robbed of all of this by technology.
And book reading. I own a Kindle, yes. But I own a entire library of books that I can curl up with at night, feeling the pages as I turn them & getting that book smell!
Propped up in bed at night while snow flies outside, reading a book & a big mug of hot chocolate steaming on my night stand.
I send out hard copy Xmas cards every year & remarkably, my friends send the same back to me…
The "e" in e-mail and e-card stands for "ephemeral."
I get the handwritten notes thing. I still write my grandmother fairly regularly because she loves it. I also find that because we default to digital, the few physical things I get increase in their specialness.
You make me wonder if I should get into scrap booking or some version of printing photos from the past year each year so I have them to look back on... Something kin to a visual journal.
I lost 10 years of digital photography in a computer/backup nightmare. I am very thankful for all the hard copy stuff that I have and the picture cd's that I made and my addiction to film photography. I also find that little postcard pictures really appeal to the public. They like to take home little momentoes as do I.
I have a similar passion for the tactile, ephemera, paper things. My career took me deep into the world of digital starting in the late 1990s, but I still yearn for the days of analog. Paper, dials, mechanicals, the weight of the camera, the touch of the film. I love your idea of shifting back into postcard writing. There's no reason why we can't reintroduce ourselves and our communities to all things paper! :)
I’m no photographer but I’m definitely a lover of paper. I started printing my daughter’s photos when she was born and have created scrapbooks. It’s hard to keep up with it but I just want her to have what I had. The ability to find an old picture, take it out of the book and frame it or share with friends. I also collect photography books and postcards. It’s fun to look back on some of the old postcards I collected when I was younger and remember what my interests were back then. I just started finding PenPals so it’s nice to share (thin out) my collection.