Memory Triage

Making photo books

In May I worked on making some photo books. It’s been my intention to do one every year, but that has not happened! At all. I made a photo book for 2010 and the next one I made was for 2020!

But it is nice to have physical photo book so I am determined to get some more done. It is probably a good idea to make photo books while you still remember what you did and where you went...

Making a photo book for 2019 was kinda weird. It was the Before Times! I went places! Twice to Denmark and once to Scotland. And I kinda don’t remembered a lot of things that I did in 2019. Whether it was because I just generally didn’t remember or because the shadow of Covid-19 lies so heavily across the past few years that it is hard to tell what is what. Or what life was like before…

I don’t know about you, but I take a lot of photos (maybe/probably too many). It’s so easy! Taking photos with my phone they get automatically uploaded to Google Photos. No need to worry about saving film for that special photo. Which is good in one way: I take pictures of random things that have some meaning to me, or that are just pretty or interesting. They are like little surprises in my photo cloud. And sometimes they make me wonder what I was thinking when I took a picture of something. It is easy to record those little moments. Like Blake being silly with all four paws in the air.

I don’t have to be precious about the photos I take but sometimes I think that maybe I should be a bit more precious about it. There are a lot of random photos that I don’t even remember two years later.

And when it comes to making a photo book and there are literally thousands of photos…well, it’s quite the project!

First I make an album for the year in Google Photos where I add any photos that strike my fancy from a particular year. Then I download that album to my computer and go through it again. Get rid of the photos that are *too* random, get rid of photos that are similar, get rid of photos that are just bad, etc etc. Then it’s time to take a look at what’s left: what do I actually want to remember when I look through the photo book in 20 years? A random (but beautiful) poppy? Obviously! An embroidery wip? Maybe!

To be honest, I have had doubts about what to include in my photo books. Should it only be people, occasions and places? Or should it be a quirky mix of those things as well as photos of a delicious pizza, pretty flowers, quilts, piles of threads, sketchbook pages, Blake looking cute?

To me the answer is obvious: the latter. I want to be able to look back at what was catching my eye, what I was doing and where and with whom. Life is quirky and mainly consists of those little things.

Going through and selecting photos is a strange process. Picking the things that you will be able to look back at and creating a sort of partial narrative of your life… Things that were important and things that were not. A memory triage of sorts.

The photo books are also useful in the present. It’s an easy way to share a little glimpse into our daily life that I can share with my friends in Denmark when I see them. They’re not all on Instagram (besides, we all know how curated that is!) so it’s nice to be able to share some photos in this way and we can talk about our day-to-day.

I use Blurb to make my books. It’s a little expensive but they often have offers on, for example I got my books with 40% off! So it’s my plan to keep working on books and then order them when I can get a good deal. I’m clever like that. ;-)

I hope you have a lovely weekend! x Carina

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Things I Am Enjoying

Watching: Urban Sketching: Capture Your City in Motion course on Domestika.

Reading: Paris By Starlight* by Robert Dinsdale.

Music: Particles (Island Songs VI) by Ólafur Arnalds & Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir.

And God Save The Queen. ;-D

Eating: Maryland vegan cookies. Enjoying them a bit too much maybe… ;-)

Instagram: @artfullywear.

*bookshop.org affiliate link. I get a small percentage of sales using my link at no extra cost to you. x