After many years of thinking about it, I finally bought a scanner. This is the first image that I scanned, this evening. It’s me with my grandfather. The family story goes that whenever he was asked to hold infant me (say, while my parents were setting the table), I would immediately fall asleep, which would necessitate everyone waiting until the powerful nap had ended before the task at hand (say, eating dinner) could be undertaken.
This is one of my favourite family photos and I’m so pleased to have a digital rendering of it. I’ve invited harvestmother over tomorrow for the first of what I hope will be several family scanathons.
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Posterous
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
aww that’s too cute. i have a pic of my nana carrying me down a driveway and i’m dead to the world over her shoulder.
Now we have to wait until we are the age of grandparents to regain the ability to nap anywhere, anytime!
While I’m not sure if my overalls in that shot are home-knitted, I’m certain that Grandad’s dapper pullover was.
I am going to cross a line here, so I will put in some line breaks, and you all can leave now if that’s not okay.
I have to have a wank before I can nap. I don’t think this will work out well with family commitments.
Joanna’s last post was It never rains but it pours
One could argue that the very young and the very old would be the most likely to get away with this, however; although in the case of my grandfather and me you can see we are a picture of innocence
(Also, multiple line breaks tend to disappear in yon html.)
I just think that in all family gatherings, there should be nap rooms set aside for people who have business to attend to. Especially with all the tension and aggression and sniping that used to happen at ours. A good space for everyone to have a wank and then a nap in would calm everyone down. /
Joanna’s last post was It never rains but it pours
This is the best idea I’ve heard this century, possibly ever.
I draw the line at a communal space, however.
Oh to have the magic of putting babies to sleep. A picture is worth 1000 words, beautiful.
I think it must be something to do with being able to give the baby back to her parents at some point!
My grandfather was a keen gardener and as a young man worked as a butter maker, so his encircling arms were particularly strong from many years of lifting, turning and churning.
moving right along…
there’s something special about that grandfather-child link, innit?
i can see he’s pleased as punch that he’s the one you trust enough to sleep with. i’m guessing it set you up for a lifetime of closeness.
Che Tibby’s last post was Review – Jay Lake, Mainspring
He used to wind me up like a clock with his silly stories. One of my kindergarten teachers was Dutch by birth and had taught us phrases in Dutch and Maori. On one occasion I was proudly showing these off to Grandad when he said, very gravely, that he could speak Chinese, then sang the Goons’ Ying Tong song. No amount of protesting from me that this surely wasn’t Chinese would move him; none I say!
The love and trust and happiness in that picture is beautiful.
I’m all for snapshots over posed pictures; I think they have a better chance of capturing something that might otherwise not be seen.
Yes, although my family’s most precious photo – this one – was posed and yet captured so much. Incidentally, it’s only survived because somebody lent me a scanner at one point in 1995 or thereabouts – the original has since been lost.
Gorgeous picture, there, Megan, I hope you’ll post some more when you’ve done further scanning.
The family photos my parents took in the 1970s and 80s are in a large wooden chest (technically a case for storing long-playing records) at their house. My mother was a bit taken aback at my stated intention to digitise everything, but that is what I want to do. Now that the 1TB hard drive is a reality, it also makes backup of digital images a far easier thing to plan.
My grandparents are all dead and one of my uncles too, so I feel something like time’s winged chariot hurrying near in terms of getting this done.
Despite what I said above, I do love early 2oth-century examples of posed photos. The “camera face” of the participants in the first age of photography was so different from the snapshot poses that we all cultivate now. The ability of my Japanese friends to pose like models as soon as anyone gets out their mobile phone camera is a source of wonder to me.
Something worth trying if you have a handycam of some sort: I sat both parents down with albums of photos and a camera- not pointing at them, but at the photos- ostensibly so they could point out who was who or details that would toherwise be lost. What I wanted- and got- was family stories and personal memories- it was rather magical. I then scanned the photos and used the soundtrack… time-consuming, and ultimately too short, too little (and in the case of my dad- rather too late!) but still a treasure.
The danger- if it can be called that- is the way memories crystallise around a photo or a story or a video clip. There’s no doubting this changes the way we view our own stories, and families, and thence ourselves. The greater danger is that feeling of being cut adrift, rootless, placeless, floating in the vaccuum-bubble of the present.
That sounds like a great process, Rob. I’ve often thought that “the way memories crystallise” is both a strength and a weakness of photos and videos as record-keeping. My mother and I scanned around 100 photos together last week, and it was interesting to hear the comments she made around them. As most of them came from my grandmother’s collection, a lot of my mother’s memories around the photos were of the process of deciding what to keep and what to throw away after my grandmother died.
It is a strange process: our kids have grown up with video-clips of themselves as babies, toddlers, young children. They talk about “the time when…(P drank the paint-water/A fell off the trampoline) and are describing scenes they’ve watched, again and again, not from the vantage-point of their own eyes, but from the camera’s point of view.
I’m sure Gio has pin-pointed this: should read that thesis!
I’m with Che, grandparent-grandchild photos are special. I have one taken at my christening with me asleep in Grandma’s arms, and my sister has one of her with my late Grandfather when she was newly born. He looked the proudest, happiest man on earth.