COLIN CAMPBELL: In the digital age, rare and precious photos have faded away
I asked a young relative how many pictures she had on her phone. She tapped it for a few seconds and then looked up with surprise. "Twenty eight thousand," she replied.
It was a startling discovery for her but that extraordinary number probably isn't quite so remarkable these days. Some people probably have more. The act - if certainly not the art - of taking a photograph is so simple now. Taking 100 is scarcely any more difficult.
A special family event these days is likely to generate greater pictorial volume than the wedding of Charles and Di. At a gathering in the south of England last year even I ended up with several hundred pictures on my phone. When I scroll through them, somehow or other they all look much the same. Because nothing stands out, scrolling is actually rather boring.
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It was not always like that. Far from it. How many households possessed a camera a few decades ago? Back then it was the only photo-taking device availabe and the answer to the question would be - not many.
There was no camera in our house when I was a youngster. The only time many of us saw one was on the special day once a year when a photographer came to school to take class pictures. I still have a photo from more than 60 years ago of our posed gaggle of crewcut boys in short trousers, and the girls in their neatest dresses. That's how it was in those days, boys knew they were boys and dressed like boys, and girls knew they were girls and dressed like girls. And no one appeared confused over what gender they were or needed guidance on "exploring" the range of alternatives available. Hard to believe in this day and age I know, but true.
The reason I made that casual photo inquiry to my relative was because at the time I had with me a small picture taken around 65 years ago. It was a group of us standing beside the family car, a Morris Minor, in a layby on the Struie. The line-up seemed more historical when I explained it to the grandchildren. It included their great-grandmother, their great-grandfather, and their great-great grandmother, who was born around 1870. They responded with polite acknowledgement of the black and white family snapshot before returning to their daily portion of the trillion videos on YouTube.
The picture means nothing much to anyone else but it means quite a lot to me and I had the idea of trying to make more of it. Maybe with modern technology it would be possible to increase the size without lessening the pixellated definition.
At Boots I was courteously told that they were geared towards digital - of course - and couldn't make anything of it. And it appears there are no old-style photo shops left in town, the kind formerly run by experts who were passionate about photography, past, present and future. Maybe there's some online service which could assist but that would mean risking the last photograph of my grandmother in existence disappearing without trace at some mail depot centre. It's unlikely but not impossible and that's too big a risk to take.
I've no doubt many others of my generation will have a tinge of regret that they don't have more photos from their childhood days. But the upside to that is that those still around have a very special rarity value.
The technology is now available to take hundreds or thousands of pictures in the virtual blink of an eye, enough to fill a room or maybe even a house if they were all printed off. Anyone can do it. But amid this pictorial deluge I do wonder how many will remain unseen in whichever digital cloud contains them, and how many will ever be as precious to their owners as that black and white family memento of a bonny day on the Struie is to me.
