Thanks for the Memories

One of the things I'm thankful for, since Thanksgiving is the time for counting our blessings, is that there is such a thing as photographs, and that my ancestors indulged their desire to record their appearance for posterity. Some of them may have regarded it as little short of sinful (judging from the expressions on a few faces), but they did it anyway. As an only child, the oldest grandchild on both sides, I seem to have become the repository of many of the ancestors' photos and tintypes and portraits in oil, pastels, watercolor or pencil. And thank the Lord for my grandmothers, the story-tellers, who made sure to label who these strange people were!

Don't get me wrong, I certainly understand where the Amish are coming from when they avoid photographs--they want to avoid making graven images. Even their dolls don't have faces. Though I think if they ever had the experience of looking at a passport photo of themselves, they would see that the rest of us certainly have no intention of worshiping the images...

And I even kind of understand where various primitive societies think that photographs steal a piece of your soul. It's just that it is such a minute piece, such a tiny instant in time, such a brief flicker of life, that we can go back to again and again to remember the pleasure of that moment, the joy we experienced and the fun we had, and to regain just an echo of the joy in the memory.

Hmmm. Maybe the soul-stealing theory explains why some of those Hollywood types seem to have no sense of morals at all--they spend all their time on camera and having their pictures taken, and it has stolen their souls away completely! Paparazzi as vampires? It might explain it. Okay, shame on me--enough snarky comments for the moment.

Anyway, one of my friends at church was telling me on Sunday about her mother coming to live with her and her family. Her father had passed on some time ago, and now the old house was empty. So my friend and her husband went in to start clearing things out, and discovered boxes of old photos in the basement. Some were moldy and many needed restoration. Some were labeled on the back with the names and some were not. There were snapshots, portrait card photos, tintypes. I guess it may not look like it at the moment, but what a treasure trove! She plans on having her mom and aunt go through the photos with her to tell her who the unlabeled ones are. And she wants to somehow preserve them. So this is partly for her, and partly for anyone who has discovered the mixed blessing that a damp box of old photos can bring.

If you have old photos you want to preserve, you can have them professionally restored and preserved, copied, filed in acid free envelopes, and stored away from light in fire-proof vaults. And that ain't cheap! Naturally, you only want to do that with the real jewels!

But as an intermediate step, particularly for the ones in good shape that you merely want to limit their exposure to sunlight, you can scan them in to your computer. Then you can get your own acid-free storage envelopes and boxes, and put the originals away in a bank lock-box or somewhere fire-proof.

Some guidelines for not damaging the originals: Use a modern cool-light flatbed scanner--alternatively, a really high resolution digital camera in good indirect light works--no scanners where you poke the photo in one end and it drags the photo over the sensor then spits it out; don't force a bent (or curled or folded) photo flat; don't take framed photos out from behind their glass as they sometimes crumble; don't jar the old cabinet photos because the silvering may not be sticking very tightly to the glass it is printed on and may flake or powder away; don't work around food or liquid--which shouldn't be around your computer or scanner anyway, but in these days of laptops and portable scanners sometimes happens; never use a permanent marker or a ballpoint to write names on the back as it will bleed or poke through the materials--use pencil or a very fine felt tip pen, lightly. Scan at very high resolution (you can store the humongous images on CD) and high color depth, even the monochrome ones. Save the image as scanned, with a very descriptive name, even if it is just "LargeFlakyTintypeFromDadsCellar_UnknownFemale3.jpg".

Make a copy of the image file to work with in PhotoShop or PaintShopPro, and try things like heightening the contrast, lightening or darkening the whole image, changing the sepia tones to gray-scale (you would be amazed at the detail that sometimes comes out of this simple step--blank faces that suddenly have features, for example), increasing the saturation of the color in old snapshots, removal of red tint (sometimes the old polaroids go weirdly red over the years), removal of the virtual mildew spots (use a clone brush to grab the color from a nearby pixel), cropping the picture and enlarging the cropped area to get a clear view of the people, and so forth. There are loads of things to try, and as long as you have saved the original image, you can go back and make multiple copies to try different techniques.

Once you have one that you love, you can print on a high resolution color printer, on a photo printer, or even send the file online to your nearest Walmart one-hour photo center for prints.

If you do the third option, remember that the minimum-wage clerks sometimes have difficulty grasping the notion (or sometimes understanding your English) that a studio photo of your granddad at age two, taken back in 1907, is no longer under copyright. In this event, you will have to talk to a manager, in order to rescue your prints that the clerk is holding hostage with the intent of doing their duty to enforce copyright law.

You will end up saying to the clerk, "What do you mean, I can't have my photo? Look, that baby is my granddad! Look at the old clothes! Look at the shoes! No one makes anything like that today! The thing was taken over a century ago! The studio has been out of business since 1952! And the photography studio was owned by my grandmother's uncle, anyway, which makes it family property! It's my granddad as an infant! And I have white hair myself, you know this can't be a recent photo! How hard can this be to understand?! Oh, get the manager." You can then say the same thing to the manager, without exclamation points, and you won't have any problem. Just make sure you ask for the manager before you start tearing your hair out. There's no sense in messing up your own appearance for a photo's appearance, and you are much more credible to the manager if you don't look like a madwoman.

Of course, do check the applicable copyright laws before trying to make a print of a studio photograph, just so you know where you stand. You can't make a copy of your kid's graduation portrait from last year, or even your wedding portrait from 20 years ago unless you bought the copyright from the photographer, and most of us didn't because it was expensive, or unless you have a written permission from the photographer or studio.

One warning: this process is painstaking and intriguing, may cause eyestrain and backache, and can be habit-forming. Side effects include learning new things about image processing, computers, art, fashion through the years, and the role of genetics in family resemblance.

And as my grandma's dear friend and neighbor used to say (about 40 years ago, about doing petit-point embroidery), "It's teedjus work, very teedjus." For those of you who need a translator, as I did back in my childhood days, it's "tedious." For those of you who are still in the dark, as I was back in my childhood days, look it up in the dictionary. But while it is teedjus, it is nonetheless extremely fulfilling to see the image come clear right in front of your eyes. Which is doubtless why Grandma's friend did petit-point in the first place, as well.

I had the great pleasure, several years ago, to do a photo-restoration favor for my grandmother (not the funny little cuddly Dutchy one, but the stern upright one with the twinkle in her eye). She had a letter from her old high school that the old school building had burnt down along with all the photos of the graduating classes. Well, Grandmother was the last living member of the Class of 1928, and she had her old yearbook, and she wanted to do something for the school in time for the annual alumni banquet. (Incidentally, Grandmother's aunt and uncle really did own the studio where the portraits were taken. There was even an ad for their studio in the back of the yearbook.) So I scanned in the portraits of each of the members of her class (all eight of them), cropped them into ovals and arranged them into two rows on one background, labeled each oval with the student's name, added the name of the school and the class at the bottom, printed it out as a high resolution 8"x10" photo (how big does it really need to be when there are only 8 people?), and framed it. We sent it along with a nice donation letter that mentioned the predictions made concerning the members of the Class of 1928 in the Class Prophecy in the yearbook, along with the actual histories of the class members.

I loved the prophecies. I remember my grandmother was going to be a "bachelor-girl" who would start as a secretary and become a successful business woman who would remain single all her life. Her sister was going to become a nurse, marry a specific fellow in the class, raise a large family and live for many years, welcoming my grandmother into her home for flying visits between business trips. Another girl in the class was going to marry my grandmother's cousin (a member of the previous year's class) after she had been a flight stewardess or something like that. Well, my grandmother obviously didn't stay a "bachelor-girl"; she married my granddad, and I for one am grateful for that--I owe my existence to the fact! She was the one who raised a large family and became a nurse--she had 4 babies of her own, and helped deliver many more as a labor-and-delivery nurse--and lived for many years, to age 96, in fact. Grandmother's sister, I think, took a secretarial course, as she hated being around sick people; she did marry a fellow from the class, but not the one predicted, and she died in childbirth several years later. The other girl in the class did marry Grandmother's cousin (though she never became a stewardess and I'm not even sure she ever flew in an airplane!), but of course, I think the Class Prophet (my Grandmother) already knew that particular romance was in the air. Clearly the Class Prophet had certain ambitions, and either wasn't much of a prophet, or only "saw through a mirror, dimly."

And so this Thanksgiving (and always), I am thankful for memories, for photographs, for modern technology, for "unanswered" prayers, for friends, for hobbies, for genealogy.