photo albums, handwritten letters, and physical things

002

Heyo!

We back with my thoughts for week two of my newsletter experiment.

what i’ve been thinking about a lot recently

I’ve been battling with my iPhones and backing up my pictures onto my PC for years now. I’ve spent many nights ripping out my hair as gigabytes of my data fail to move from my iPhone to a Windows PC. I tried flash drives, even walked 30 minutes to borrow a friend’s mac, and even a decades old MacBook that my sister have to try to get the photos out. All to back up my photos.

About a year ago, I actually lost an entire semester’s worth of memories because I dropped my phone and couldn’t recover the pictures. It stings, looking back a year ago in my photo album and just having this gap of a few months of my life, vacant. I’m always curious what I’ve been doing one year ago today, just to see and feel if I’ve grown since the last year and what I was doing on any given day. In many ways, my photo album is my life - my recorded life, a digital manifestation of my memory, as I see my life.

That semester was such an exciting time, getting to know so many new friends and putting my heart into building a club at my university, and yet all of that documented went to waste. That really motivated me to have this spiritual dedication to this backup practice because, at it’s core, I’m trying to preserve my memories. Without these pics and videos, it’s just so much harder to recall all the good times and see how far I’ve come.

Like I said, I’ve been trying to implement some sort of consistent practice of backing things up for years now. It’s an uphill battle, because I take pictures at a faster rate than I am willing to sit down for a few hours and back them up every once in a while. Thankfully, I’m finally caught up on backing up my photos now. But man, the hours and hours I’ve spent looking through, cataloguing, and deleting all of my photos was hellish.

That brings us to today. So why don’t I back things up automatically using iCloud or Google Photos? It seems silly, but I just really don’t want my data out there and it seems… unreliable. What I really want it to all of my documented memories in my hand, and multiple copies at that. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to own my data, own my memories --- and, well, just owning things.

I watched some really nice videos on this topic this week:

The Importance of Real Things The Streaming Era is HORRIBLE! (Importance of Physical Media) How to Remember Your Life Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte | SXSW 2024 Keynote

When me and my sister spend time looking through old photo albums in our house - whether it be finding our old baby pictures, seeing how young our parents look, or just finding old birthdays or what people wore back in the day - that sort of joy inside a real, tangible artifact — a book — is something special. To my parents’ generation, printing out pictures for cheap was a novelty; and so, my parents printed out dozens of thick photo albums, all with a old camera vibe and a printed date on the corner of the pictures (I wonder if the camera just automatically put that on the picture? vintage stuff, huh?)

And welp, I don’t really have a single photo album to my name. No paper trail.

That’s another thing I’ve been thinking about: I heard that most of the things we know about historical figures is from the letters they wrote to other people. I recently wrote some letters to my graduating friends, and I really enjoyed putting my heart onto the paper for somebody else. I can also appreciate the way that a handwritten letter is all the more special in a digital space of texting, DMing, and instantaneous replies. It really sounds like I’m just being all “oh don’t look at your phone”, but really, it goes deeper. I just feel like the time, space, and energy to sit down and write a letter isn’t really around anymore. There’s just something so ethereal, so intimate about a letter, knowing the patience it took to sit down and write. My dad is a calligrapher, and so I especially appreciate the charm of an older person’s handwriting: from an age where handwriting was the only way to send correspondence.

In an age of abundance and endless content and streams of information, the more analog ways of preserving, keeping, owning stuff is a reflection of oneself. It reflects taste in an age of indulgence. What you are willing to keep, what you are willing to have in the end defines what we value, and ultimately what we are. So in that sense, I hope to at least keep some of those photos around, for as long as I can. I guess we are the first generation to be able to document, film, and picture our entire lives, and have enough terabyte storage to hold onto it. But the more analog photo album forces me to pick my favorites to print, and thus defines the memories I hold most dear.

And plus, isn’t having a book of photos just lovely, in general?

a bingo card

A good friend who graduated this year convinced me to make a bingo card for the summer. It seems like a very fun way of keeping track of my silly goals. I haven’t filled it out yet, but printing out a photo album just for myself will definitely be on it. If I’m continue with printing out the pictures of my life, I can show it to others, and perhaps my children. And their children.

And I’ll make it a point to write more letters.

Thanks for reading! It’s a bit of a long one. I’ll see you next week :))

Evan