I have only one picture of my great grandmother.
It is sepia toned, with blue dip pen notes on the back.
She’s wearing old fashioned clothing. She is not smiling.
It’s difficult to assume anything about her life except that she was staunch: her eyes look into the camera and beyond it with the power of one of Bruce Lee’s punches.
I have maybe 80 photographs of my grandparents, only on the one side of the family, since that’s the side I know. Five large albums with photos displaying the history of home photography, from black and white through Kodacolor. These images were captured on purpose, my grandparents pausing an event to commemorate it.
A milestone at work
(Grandpa with his judicial robes on behind the bench)
A business trip
(a Hawaiian luau)
Relaxing
(fishing on the pontoon boat)
My grandparents appear diligent yet deceptively lighthearted for the times in which these photos were taken, but this is their story, passed on in shiny squares, and later rectangles.
I have two shoeboxes filled with shots of me and my mom, growing up. Most were taken with a 110 camera, this amazing cartridge film format popular when I was a kid, with cameras that looked like they were from Star Trek: you advanced the film with a slidey thing that your thumb pushed. There’s not many of us together, because there were only two of us, so somebody had to be taking the picture. Maybe 500 images in those boxes? There’s only so many because I bought a second hand SLR camera in high school and began taking random shots of everything, when I could afford the film.
Now, on a hard drive, our little family has (at last count) over 87,000 photos. Enough to print out as a flip book and experience the past in real time, which there’s no point in doing because there’s also gigabites of video, days and days of it.
History used to be eleven inches tall, three feet wide and weigh about seven pounds. Back then, Everything That Had Ever Happened could be found in a good set of encyclopedias.
I was not so dull a child as to believe that if I read every volume I would know all there was to know, but I did grow comfortable at how vast yet containable the near entirety of human learning was. I could clearly see Everything That Had Ever Happened from the left side of the living room couch, neatly arranged on one and three quarter bookshelves across the room.
Now, history has no shape, form, weight or substance. It is impossible to display, and we are allowed to only access tiny pieces, one at a time.
the length of a day on Mars
the capital of Madagascar
the inventor of soup in a can
Unburdened by space and context, history has dissolved, it is liquid, a solution of fact within information. Every search for knowledge now begins not at the beginning but from the very center of knowledge itself, the answer to every question a vast list that must be sifted through to find what we wish to learn.
…this mysterious fruit will lower your cholesterol (sift)
…shocking celebrity gossip (sift)
…look, there’s a sale at Penny’s (sift)
Aha. Here is how to reset the Apple TV remote.
When history was held in print there were cookbooks for recipes, journals for personal information, and newspapers as the home of daily events. Now technology is obscuring history within itself, like the Library of Alexandria after the siege…every page of everything ever written unbound and placed in an ever expanding pile.
And I’m not helping. Along with my tens of thousands of digital snaps are three hundred cassette tapes from my 4-track recorder days spanning over forty years…What nugget of musical theatre may lurk within the clackety depths of this pile of non-degradable plastics? Not to mention the notebooks, filled with what I will still defend as “ideas”…isolating those into their own box seemed to multiply them like rabbits.
In general, there seems to be a lot more history than there used to be. Not only because so many things have happened between Then and Now, but because so many new details are coming to light to fill out the shadows of Way Back When. There’s so much more past than there used to be.
So I’m a little behind on my historical research. For Black History Month, I had about seven books to read and four movies to watch. But then I accidentally discovered the music of William Grant Still, the first American composer to have their opera performed at the New York Opera House, and then Beyoncé dropped a country single, and now I’m overwhelmed.
I appreciate that history is supposed to chronicle what is significant, and that I have more power than ever before to discover and determine that for myself, but with Everything That Ever Happened still technically happening, it’s hard to know where to begin. And I believe that within the tens of thousands of selfies and digital flotsam I’ve amassed, there is probably one truly significant photo, one that my great grandchildren could see that would sum it all up, where they could look at my eyes and instantly know where they came from.
Encyclopedia (brown).