For a generation that takes way more photos than any generation before us, we sure don’t really get any developed.
So this summer, after pushing it off for way too long, I finally went through about ten years of pictures and ordered prints, and I don’t know why I pushed it off so long, because it only cost nine cents a picture, plus like 45 dollars shipping. But I made it up in volume, because I got 700 pictures out of it, which my family has now looked through once. And in a rush, because they weren’t spending 700 minutes looking through them.
I wanted to print out photos for my kids to look at, even though they’ve already seen most of the pictures, because I have great memories as a kid of looking through photo albums with my siblings, all gathered around my mother, until my mother sniffed the air and said, “Someone needs a bath,” and then she’d take a guess and send a random sibling off. And if that didn’t do it, she’d send another. Good times.
There is a reason I pushed it off, though. It’s that thanks to the miracle of technology, this whole process of weeding through what to print is a bigger pain than ever before:
In the old days, we had a system: You had a bunch of rolls in your house, and you didn’t know if they were full or empty, and you brought them to the drug store because pharmacists didn’t have enough to do with their time because there were far fewer drugs back then, and they’d develop your pictures behind closed doors using… Drugs, I guess? And maybe prescribe something for the skin condition they’d caught a peek of while developing the photos. And then you brought your pictures home and said, “Oh.”
You got what you got.
“When are these from? This one is black with a line through it, this one is just a thumb, this one was taken inside someone’s pocket I think, this one is entirely red…”
And if some of your memories didn’t come out, they were no longer your memories. You’d forget them soon enough. That trip to the planetarium never happened.
But you wouldn’t have weeded through it even if you could. That roll of 24 pictures represented an entire month of your life, so every picture was precious. You put that red photo right in the album so you could ask relatives as you got to it, “What do you think that was? It happened between these two other events.” and everyone would have their own suggestion. Sometimes you would flip it upside down so people could develop more suggestions. Whereas nowadays, 100 pictures represents a two-second stretch of spamming the shutter button over and over, hoping for the one perfect second.
In the old days, you pressed the button once. You only had 24 pictures. Whatever shot you got was good enough, and if one person wasn’t looking at the camera, everyone made their peace with it. Nowadays, you press the button several dozen times, so you can sort through and pick which one is best. And still, in a group shot especially, every picture is better for a different person. There was no moment that all 60 people were smiling. So you’re still going to end up with a version in which at least one person is looking away, but it’s going to take you more time of flipping back and forth and playing “Spot the Difference” to decide which person it should be. You have to pick, and nobody cares, because if they’re in the picture, they’re basically just looking at themselves to make sure they came out okay.
“How come I’m not smiling?”
“That’s on you. You should have been smiling the whole time.”
“It was ten minutes!”
Our grandparents had it even simpler. Just a short while ago, you went to your grandparents’ house and they had pictures on the wall of their relatives, and those were all the pictures of those relatives that existed in the world. There were no albums. If there was a fire, c’v, the plan was to grab those frames off the wall. Some of the frames had money hidden behind them.
They were like, “This is it. There is one good picture of my grandfather in existence, standing next to some guy we can’t identify.” Seeing as technology had to be worse back then, my guess is that they got back the entire roll, and that was the one usable photo. Were there rolls back then? I think maybe a camera had one shot in it, like an old-timey gun. You’d take the picture, the camera would smoke, and that would be it. If you wanted to use it again, you’d have to change the fuse, and maybe tamp down some more gunpowder.
Whereas nowadays, we end up weeding through a lot of pictures that were never meant to be saved long term. No one took pictures like this in the old days:
“So here’s a picture of my new sheitel. What do you think?”
“Oh, here’s that item at the store that I wanted to know if you wanted. I took a picture of the ingredients.”
“Hey, and here’s that picture of that recipe I was too lazy to write down!”
In the old days, we took far fewer pictures. Your entire family for the most part had one camera, which you kept in a central location in the house and forgot to bring it everywhere. And the camera had the name of the family on it that you’d put on with a label maker, so that in case you left it somewhere, some stranger would call and say, “I found your camera!” which never happened. Every family only had one phone, and it was attached to the house.
Anyway, in those days you put all your used film canisters in one spot so you could gather them up and bring them to the store, whereas nowadays we have ten folders in our computer labeled “pictures,” and in some of them, there are subfolders labeled “Old Phone,” “Old Phone 2,” and then a file that you put together for Zaidy’s birthday party of photos that may also exist in other folders. You also have a folder labeled “To Develop,” that you started at some point, and you’re like, “Hey, I was organized!” so you start loading photos into it until you realize that all of those have already been developed.
Well, mostly. Because besides for your computer, you also need the photos from your spouse’s computer. And phone. My wife takes before and after photos of people’s kitchens (she does kitchen design), plus apparently her phone automatically saves all the pictures that my second cousins post on the international family chat, so in total, I was looking through about 15,000 photos, which is why I quit once I got it down to 700. By that point I was talking to myself. Here are some of the things that might have been said:
• Boy, we sure have a lot of pictures of us lighting menorahs.
• We have 56 distinct menorah pictures from the last ten years! I have no idea what year anything is.
• Should we just start hanging a sign on the window with the year on it before we light every year?
• Whose baby is this?
• We keep pictures of kevarim, right? It feels like we should, but it also feels sad to put them in middle of the album, right between Chanukah and Purim.
• Do we care about the pictures of how much snow we got every year, or should I just keep the deepest one?
• Who are all these skinny people?
• These pictures of my kids pretending to drive cars in a showroom are a lot less cute now that they all have licenses.
• How many pictures do we have of the same health insurance card? Do we take it every time?
• I can’t tell who’s on the paddleboats in the distance. Is it us? I don’t want to print it if it’s not us.
• Whose baby is this?
• Should we keep these pictures of all the couches we looked at but didn’t buy? What if it comes up in conversation about why we settled on the couches we ended up with? I know this has happened. And we’d be literally looking at pictures on the couches.
• What about this photo of everyone turning to look at one specific person in the photo, where everyone was behaving except one kid, and the photographer kept saying, “Everyone look at me… Look at me… DANIEL!” and everyone looked at Daniel.
• Do we still need all these photos of ducks at the park? Are these specific ducks we need to remember, or can we always just go back and see different ducks? (“That’s the one that liked raisin challah!”)
• Boy, we sure take a lot of pictures of what’s going on outside our front window.
• Here’s one of the trash collectors taking the old couch.
• Which Purim did my daughter dress up as a Prairie girl from the 1800s? Wait; was that a Bais Yaakov play?
• What about all the pictures from the tablecloth gemach? Should I print them now, or save them for the bar mitzvah album?
• How young are this chassan and kallah? 12?
• Is this a Siddur play or a Chumash play? I can’t tell which sefer he’s holding. For which one was he wearing a big Gimmel?
• Maybe Gemara play?
• How many pictures do we need of fireworks? They’re not actually that impressive in pictures. No one looks at a picture of fireworks and goes, “Oooh!… Aaaaah!…”
• Whose thumb is this? n
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.
