Dear Photograph

Dear Photograph is a website that I have come across that deals with memory ,photography and tradition becoming digital. It is an open site for anybody to post there "Dear Photograph" to share with the world. I was in tears reading through the comments and looking through the pictures people had posted , old photographs and nostalgic memory's can be so emotive and this website is a beautiful idea. Instead of sharing images on social media sights which I feel can be very impersonal these pictures are purposely taken to become digitalised and shared. The site simply states " Take a picture of a picture from the past in the present" and you have the option to upload your own image and look at others .There are recurrent themes that the same of a memory box such as childhood and death but looking through the site there is a uplifting undertone of family and experiences again much the same as a memory box.

Dear Photograph,Our Once Upon A Time began on Feb 16th, 2013…I remember this moment like it was yesterday. Beautiful, sunny day walking on the beach enjoying each others company. What would happen next, marked the beginning of an adventure I have always wanted to take and a story that we will forever hold dear to my hearts. This picture of a picture (taken exactly one year later in 2014), to us, is worth MORE than a thousand words. 
Love Always,
A girl who believes in “Happily Ever After”

Dear Photograph,
I miss the days when the dream to lace ‘em up in the blue and white was still alive.
Brandon

Dear Photograph,
Life seemed so simple in the days of black and white .
You were father of four daughters and loving it.
But time has a way of changing.
The car is gone, the dog is gone and you have been gone seven years now.
The only thing that is remaining are the mountains that you loved 
and the memories we hold near and dear to our hearts.
Loving and missing you still, your four daughters.
Till we meet again. -Clydene
(August 7, 1928 - April 15, 2007)

I have found an article on "Dear Photograph" on the observer website written by John Naughton. He speaks about the pros and cons of both "Dear Photography" and digitalising your photographs and memory's. Plus he ends his article with the same quote which I began so I bound to like it . This article and the time I have left on this project have got me thinking about concentrating my research and development further .I have briefly explored the digitalisation of our memory's but at this stage I really want to go back to tradition memory boxes , photography and physical keep sakes. I have plenty of time in future projects to explore digitalisation further but right now I want to focus on tradition. I have included extracts from the article.

 

Dear Photograph is a remarkable demonstration of the power of ordinary, humdrum photographs to evoke memories. Anyone who has ever found a shoebox of old prints in an attic will know this. They yield up images of ourselves when we were young, slender and innocent, of our parents with unlined, carefree expressions and unfurrowed, untroubled brows, of holidays once enjoyed, places once visited. Photographs freeze moments in time, reminding us of who we were – and, by implication, of who we have become.

But Dear Photograph is also a stark reminder of how threatened this power of photography has become. There is, for one thing, the brusque, matter-of-fact, upfront Terms and Conditions of the site. "When you submit your materials," it reads, "you grant dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licenced, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise under our discretion in any and all media". Or, to adapt the famous broken English internet meme, "all your memories are belong to us".

There's nothing new in this, of course. It also applies to the billions of photographs that have been posted to Facebook, under Terms and Conditions stipulating that "you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP Licence). This IP Licence ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."

The other sobering thought triggered by Dear Photograph is that the site is only possible because of the relative permanence of analogue photography. The images on the site are, of course, digital, but they could only have been created using old photographic prints. All of which means that it will be very difficult to do something like this in 30 years' time.

The reason is that while digital technology has generally been very good for photography as a mass medium, it has also made the resulting imagery much more fragile and impermanent. Of the billions of photographs taken every year, the vast majority exist only as digital files on camera memory cards or on the hard drives of PCs and servers in the internet "cloud". In theory – given the right back-up regimes and long-term organisational arrangements – this means that they could, theoretically, endure for a long time. In practice, given the vulnerability of storage technology (all hard disks fail, eventually), the pace at which computing kit becomes obsolete and storage formats change, and the fact that most people's Facebook accounts die with them, the likelihood is that most of those billions of photographs will not long survive those who took them.

That's why Magnum photographer Martin Parr concluded his terrific piece last year on how to take better holiday photographs with a simple piece of advice: print your pictures. "We are in danger," he wrote, "of having a whole generation that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted." He's right.

 

As I have previously mentioned there are 171 printed photographs in my memory box . I do not wish to upload them to the official site but I wanted to give the" dear Photograph" style of photography a try . Re-visiting past locations and also thinking about what the photograph means to me and possibly others. Looking through the images in my memory box this is a much bigger task that originally anticipated. As well as the means to the photograph I was also concentration on location and where was accessible for me to re-visit. Although I would very much like to I don't think taking a week off university would be practical to go and recreate a snapshot abroad !  So I am purposely restricting myself to images taken in my current home town of Morecambe and its surrounding areas.  

 

 

 

 Dear Photograph,

I was a member of a dance school for virtually the whole of my childhood / Teenage years

I left far too soon and quickly lost touch with them all

would love to re-unite and have a boogie

Sally .

 

 

 

Dear Photograph,

I live in the most beautiful place

and I am grateful everyday  

I indend to have many more pictures with many more people around the Eric Morecambe Statue

Sally.



Dear Photograph ,

When/ if i ever have children and they dislike there hair being brushed

Show them this picture

I did love my tommy Bomber jacket though.

Sally.