Shoebox memories

Larino, Italy (circa 1930)

When I was reading last week comments thread about archiving photos, it came to mind the old ways of doing it: the shoe-box where people were keeping their prints. It may seem primitive, but I suspect it was actually much more effective than the high tech digital way. I have a shoe-box with family photos from the beginning of the last century, scratched and discolored, but still legible: I wonder if my digital files will be still usable one hundred years from now. CDs and DVDs surely will not last that long... I will try to migrate the files from one hard drive to another, but it is unlikely that anybody will continue to do so after I will be gone. Assuming that there will still be a program capable to read JPG files (I am sure nobody will be able to read PSDs or Nikon NEF files). Maybe companies like Google should start selling “digital vaults” guaranteed to keep your files alive and usable for the next few hundred years...

Anyway, if you really care about a photo, probably the safer way to preserve it for posterity is a good print, and the old shoe-box storage (ok, there are better boxes now for that than the old acid paper shoe-boxes).

The photo above (after restoration of scratches, holes and discoloration) comes from my family’s “vault of memories” shoe-box. The men with the mustache is my grand-grandfather, and the standing lady in the black dress is my grand-grandmother. My grandmother is the young lady sitting. My aunt is the girl in the white dress. The photo was shot in the early 1930s in Larino, a small town in the south of Italy from where my family (mother side) is from. My mother wasn’t born when the photo was shot.

This digital reproduction has a story of its own. I did it while I was a graduate student in Trieste (Italy) in 1994. The internet at the time was a very new thing, mostly restricted to universities and labs. This is before the “internet bubble” even started (we used “Mosaic” as web browser, before its developers went on to fund “Netscape”), and the web was a collection of random pages written in very crude HTML, with very few low resolution GIF files (no JPG at the time). Our university was very liberal in letting us play around with the web, and the first thing all of us did was to create our personal “Home Pages”. My original front page is still there: http://www.sissa.it/~marengo/. At that time there weren’t search engines: a very popular site was the “web roulette” (not a gambling site!!!) consisting of a single button in the middle of the page, sending you to a random page on the web. Kind of Google’s “feeling lucky” without the need of entering a search string... well there wasn’t actually much to search.

When the internet grew and people outside academia started to have access to it, and the first search engines appeared, my page become very popular among people in latin america and Australia looking for their italian ancestors. I started to receive a lot of email requests from people with my same family name, asking if I was one of their long lost relatives. Now that the page is no more updated, and it has lost the favor of search engines, the requests have tapered down...

Compared to the “internet time”, that page looks really ancient, even though it has barely 15 years. Nothing, compared to the photo it shows, that has more than 70 years and will probably still be seen by the descendants of the people it portrays, long after the web site will disappear from the face of the internet.