FROM THE MAGAZINE: A Tangled Web
Technology is making it harder than ever to delete the past
By Sandy Hingston
My daughter Marcy and her boyfriend Mario are sitting on my living room sofa, aiming her cell-phone camera at themselves. They kiss, shoot, check the image, kiss, shoot, check the image, seeking the perfect photo to post on Marcy’s Facebook page. I smile at them and head for the kitchen, passing, on my way, a white wooden cabinet that happens to be filled to bursting with yellow Kodak envelopes. Some of the envelopes are marked with a month and year on the outside, or “West Virginia Vacation,” but most of them aren’t. When Marcy and her younger brother Jake were little, I was dutiful about recording their lives in photographs, but less dutiful about organizing the results. My friend Ruth keeps her carefully selected pictures of her three boys in handsome albums, complete with where-and-when captions. Me, I just stopped taking photos when the cabinet was full.
There was a ritual aspect to snapping pictures with my old 35mm camera that even Marcy remembers fondly. You’d go to CVS, fill out the form, put your film in the envelope, drop it in the slot … and wait.
Read the rest of “A Tangled Web.”
Illustration by the Tyler School of Art from the May 2008 issue of Philadelphia.
