A black and white world

I have spent a considerable proportion of this week sorting through and scanning old photographs. There are dozens of albums full of bad pictures, many of which are out of focus with horizons at all angles, and many more that are fading like the memories that they represent.

Instants in time that can never be recaptured, old photos remain a treasured part of many families posessions and even those which contain images of people that we never met or have no recollection of, are kept and passed down the generations. I have ancient pictures of people that died before I was born and yet I look at them and wonder what sort of people they were and what their lives were like.

It reminded me of a conversation that I had with my own children a while back. They were talking about things that they believed as kids, and one startling concept was that both of them thought that their parents grew up in a world that was black and white. They had seen the old greyscale images and the black and white movies and of course for them it meant that was how things used to be. neither could recall when they realised that their perception was false.

It is so easy to read into images from the past, what we want to imagine. We can look at a happy looking family group and imagine that all was as it seems to be, but family albums are filled with posed pictures and a posed picture by definition is a lie.
Many of the images that I have scanned today were of school plays that I produced all those years ago; moments onstage or assembled montages of people who have long since grown up and gone their separate ways. Some I know have died, and yet when I look at those images I see the vibrant and wonderful people that they once were.

It has been fun restoring some of those faded images to life - good old photoshop - What a pity that there is no such device for restoring the faded memories.

I will, as was my original plan, upload these images to facebook so that many, now approaching their middle years can wax nostalgic about their school days. The photo albums can then be replaced and forgotten about once again.