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True Confessions of a Former Pack Rat | |
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Monday 26th Jan 2009 |
Ever wonder how long you might be able to get away with squirreling away your photo prints in shoeboxes, on shelves, stashed away here and there all over your house? How long before some poor innocent is buried in an avalanche after unwittingly opening the door of an overstuffed closet? Our friend, photographer Kelli Taylor, decided not to find out. As a photographer, my life has always been filled with photographs. And as a pack rat, my home has forever been flush with them, too. For years I was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of my prints, and would often keep them in their original photo envelopes, in plastic bags or storage boxes, tucked into any bare space that seemed safe. They hid in drawers, in cabinets, under the bed, and only occasionally in photo albums. Most people keep a treasure box of one kind or another. It seem’s Kelli’s are archival boxes filled with photographs. Other Koloists have shared a variety of examples of their treasure boxes, such as those you can see here… here… and here. If you have treasure box, what do you keep inside? |
7 comments
I find it difficult to file prints chronologically coz *time* is something I try to stay away from. So many things happen in a year and it will be like multiplying a messy collection of prints in smaller versions.
You have a black and a red Havana box here in this photo, are these the only two colors you have? I love the idea to use Havana to decorate my home and invite curiosity.
...It reminds me when I was in college and visited my friend's house, in his childhood bedroom there was a large frame that contained a collection of every single school photo of my friend, kindergarten through high school. He took a lot of ribbing for that, but he didn't take the pictures down. I think like everyone else, he was drawn by curiosity to the series of photos of him, one snapshot per year, that showed how his face had changed gradually from a small child's face to an adult face over 15 years. It was interesting to see all those photos all lined lined up that way, and to study the nuanced changes from one photo to the next.
But something tells me you have some good suggestions of your own...? How have you organized your prints?
Patrick, you make a great point about the trickiness of organizing photos chronologically. Right now, my two Havanas (the red and the black) are ordered by year… but mainly because it was easiest to transfer them from envelope to box that way. Moving forward, though, I really love the idea of using a more personalized system. A box for family & friend photos, another for travel, a third for photo projects, etc. There’ll probably be a bit of overlap (since it’s rare that subject matter is that cut and dry), but I think it might make for a more interesting method than just going by date, month, and year. Sometimes it’s fun to mix it up. I adored your travel photos from your October post. I’m sure there are many more where those came from! What’s your favorite method of storing them?
http://moleskine.vox.com/library/post/these-are-the-things-we-store.html
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