I was recently at a screening of The Art of Observation, a documentary on the life and work of Ted Grant, known at the father of Canadian photojournalism.  It was written, co-produced, and co-directed by Heather MacAndrew for Bravo Canada. Mr. Grant and Ms. MacAndrew graciously gave up a beautiful Sunday morning to be with 150 personal historians at the closing session of our annual conference in Victoria, B.C. and answer questions about their work and the film.

The film is rich on many levels, but I feature it here as an example of a beautifully done personal history: artistically presenting the intersection of an individual’s life and career with the powerful historic forces of his time and place. The production values are outstanding. [Yeah, yeah, I know. Most of us do not have the budget of a major national network behind us.] Nonetheless, there is a great deal we can learn by studying the lighting, the voice-overs, the editing. Good creative and technical decisions don’t cost money, but they do require a mastery of the craft.

But even more important than production quality [and I do think that is a very important part of the work we do as professional story tellers] is to see what a strong story Ms. MacAndrew has shaped. Yes, she is telling the story of the man who defined Canadian photojournalism and influenced the profession all over the world. And she is surely aware that this story will become part of an important historical record, catalogued into university and archive center collections. But she is also telling the story of an ordinary man. A son and a husband. A father and a grandfather. A teacher, a citizen, a neighbor.

This is the work we do as personal historians. We draw out and record a person’s life: looking for the distinctive gestures and vocal inflections, the small details, the meaningful objects, the story that wants to be told. And then we present it in the most artful way we can as a gift to the future.

If you are interested in photography, filmmaking, personal history, 20th century history, or Canadian history, I encourage you to get the film. [Lots of great bonus tracks as well.] Watch it more than once. Deconstruct it. Integrate it into your own personal history storytelling, regardless of the medium you work in. And do what you can to get Ted Grant: The Art of Observation into wider distribution.

Photo as object, image, memory, icon…this phrase has been rolling around in my brain for years. It is the foundation of the work I do creating digital archives, recording snippets of personal history, and designing privately-published books. And it’s what makes me swoon when I can see and touch an original photograph: Kodacolor prints from the 70s that have color-shifted to orange, autochrome glass slides and faded silver prints from the early 20th century, tintypes and cartes de visites from the Civil War era.

photo as object

An object is tangible, composed of atoms. I can touch it, hold it, carry it around. These objects have often been the focus of bitter dispute when dividing possessions during a divorce or clearing out a family house. But, just as often, it seems, they end up separated from their family of origin, languishing forlorn and forgotten in the back room of an antique shop. Some lucky ones get a new lease on life if they can make their way to specialized photo flea markets in cities like New York & Boston or into historical archives. This photo is one that Suzanne Fox rescued from oblivion:

credit: “orphan” photo from Suzanne Fox personal collection

Photo Detective Maureen Taylor has been able to touch photos-as-object from the dawn of the photographic age in researching her book The Last Muster.

One of my early digital archiving job involved handling cartes de visites from the Civil War era. The image below shows that the paper tax was paid.

credit: Cora Sjogren-Welch personal collection

More recently I have been organizing and digitizing a large collection of magic lantern glass slides.

credit: The George Nelson Collection, The Archive Center-Indian River County Library

Whenever I encounter these photos as object I wonder: Where has it traveled? Who has touched it? Has it been carried close to their heart? Folded it into a wallet? What is the meaning of the cryptic messages written on the back or around the margins? Why has this face been scribbled over? [Don’t tell me you haven’t—not ever?!?]

credit: Suzanne Fox personal collection

photo as image

This specially treated paper, composed of ink or dye, presents an image. If that image was created by film processing, there may be  multiple photos-as-object of the same image. In my work digitizing historic photos at the county library archives I see many cases where the original photo-as-object has been photographed to create a negative from which additional prints are made. As these multiple photos-as-object travel their own life path, they pick up a unique set of crinkles, notations, tears and marks.

credit: The Indian River County Historic Society Collection, The Archive Center-Indian River County Library

photo as memory—and meaning

I can look at this photo from my personal collection and tell you facts about the photo: the who, what, where, and when of it. But the memories triggered by this photo will be different for each person pictured. And the meaning I derive from these memories may shift as I look at the image at different times in my life, from different perspectives.

credit: cj madigan personal collection

I expect that this photo elicits memories beyond the few people pictured here. You may look at this photo and very likely have a memory triggered about your own experiences: with friends, in high school, wearing a garment or hairstyle like one of the people in the image has.

photo as icon

Icons are a precious object in their own right, imbued with the Holy Spirit as well as the spirit of the person who wrote it. The images used in traditional icons are limited but are interpreted and rendered in different ways and executed with varying degrees of finesse. And the memory or meaning triggered is likely different for each person who reads the icon—and likely different each time the same person encounters it. And this entire constellation—icon as object, icon as image and icon as meaning, creates a sacred experience that is more than the elements present and that points beyond itself to another level of being and meaning.

Image by Novica / Novica Nakov via flickr used under a Creative Commons License

I believe photos have such an iconic quality. I am not talking about iconic photos, such as Marilyn Monroe standing over a New York street grate or the VE Day Times Square Kiss. I am talking about those often overlooked objects jammed into drawers and packed away in attics. These are our contemporary icons.

credit: cj madigan personal collection

In future posts, I intend dig deeper into these various manifestations of photos, exploring what it means for those of us who are infatuated with these magical pieces of chemically treated paper [or tin or glass]: so ubiquitous, so ordinary, yet so precious. I welcome your thoughts and reactions.

]]> http://shoebox-stories.com/2010/10/photo-as-object-image-memory-icon/feed/ 8 http://shoebox-stories.com/2010/09/tell-your-life-story-with-20-pictures/ http://shoebox-stories.com/2010/09/tell-your-life-story-with-20-pictures/#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:06:28 +0000 cj-madigan http://shoebox-stories.com/?p=1265 Well, maybe it’s more like a collection of very short stories. My point is, it’s easy to get started. Pull out 20 – or 12 or 37 – photos. [How about 17 for a haiku?] Write down the who-what-where and -when of each one. Then write a little more. Give it some context. What happened just before the picture was taken? What happened afterwards? Who’s not in the frame? What do you remember thinking and feeling then? How do you think about this event now?

Put them together in some way – a scrapbook, a photo album, a print-on-demand book.

I just went through this exercise to make a sample book for a new product I’m offering: a Snapshot Stories™ book. Without a lot of thought, I grabbed 20 photos that happened to be already digitized and accessible on my computer. They range from when I was about three years old to…well, let’s just say, fairly recently. They show my growing up years, my time living abroad and traveling, my immersion in graduate studies and a creative practice. They include family and friends and lovers and colleagues. Without giving much thought to themes or structures, they paint a picture of my life in broad strokes.

If I were to go through this exercise again I might choose 20 different photos. Or I might tell slightly different stories about these photos because each time I revisit the events and people in my life, I see them from a different perspective.

What is important is to start capturing our stories. Stories of what it’s been like to be a particular person, living in a particular time and place. Then getting them into some format that can be passed on to future generations. Wouldn’t you love to come across a book of captioned photos that your great-great-grandmother put together? Or even  someone who is no relation but who lived a hundred years ago in the house where you live now? I imagine people in 2052 or 2087 will be just as intrigued to come across our stories and photos.

We all have stories that only we can tell. Let’s get them down and pass them on.

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a page from my sample book:

This is my favorite photo of myself. It was taken in the British Virgin Islands around 1969/70. We started barboat chartering there with my father [name removed] in the late 60s – he would organize people from his Power Squadron and he invited me and whatever boyfriend I was with at the time, my roommate and her boyfriend, and we’d go for 7-10 days. This picture was taken at the end of the day – I always felt so myself on the boat, on the water. Never more than when we made the blue-water crossing from St. Thomas to St. Croix.

Storytelling Series: “Remember Me” by Lesley Graham from Blurb Books on Vimeo.

Here is a preview of some of the book’s pages:

Did you notice the personal history of the bookmaker Leslie Graham that wraps around the story of her grandfather in the video? Imagine when her grandchildren see the book and the video about the making of the book.

This is personal history. Capturing  stories before they disappear into the darkness of time and loss. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be meticulously researched. It just needs to be done.

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Some related links that might be of interest:

The Association of Personal Historians, a professional organization whose 600+ members help individuals, families, communities and organizations  record and save precious memories and stories in a variety of media.

Other ways of presenting a personal history.

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Organize before you start. Put like with like; photos of the same size were often taken at the same time. so adjustments made to one can often be applied to others in that batch. If you work from largest to smallest or vice versa, you won’t have to change your scanning resolution so frequently.

Develop a file naming system. The file name is like a social security number: its purpose is simply to distinguish one item from another. This is the simple system I have been using for years:

• a three letter monogram to refer to the collection, such as JXS for Jane X Smith’s collection
• a two digit batch number, which might be a box or an album or just a pile of photos delivered at one time
• and a four-digit sequence number.

This is what the file name would look like: JXS-03-0038.tif

Link the physical object to the digital file. Write the digital file name on the back of the photo in a soft pencil or print them out on archival labels. This will help you know which photos have already been digitized.

What resolution? Everyone says 300 dpi, but that’s only half the answer. There are two factors involved here: the resolution of the scan and the resolution of the output. Many old photos are 1×1.5″ or smaller, so if you scan at 300 dpi, and then print it as a 5×7″, its output resolution would be only 60 dpi. So you should scan at a resolution that will yield approximately 300 dpi at output.

Don’t know what the final output size will be? Then scan at a resolution that give you 3000 pixels on the long side. Most scanning software shows the number of pixels that will be created at various resolutions. In the case of the 1×1.5” photo mentioned above, you would want the 1.5” side to have 3000 pixels so your scanning resolution would be between 2000-2400.

File formats, colors, and bits. Scan in color even for black and white photos. You’ll notice that the tonal value of b&w prints changes depending upon the paper and processing and deterioration over time. This will also keep you from making a mistake and forgetting to change back to color when you have color photos. A color file can always be converted to b&w but color can only be added back into a grayscale image by digitally painting it.

Artists and photographers have very demanding color fidelity requirements so would usually set their scanners to capture 16-bits per channel. [This is sometimes expressed as 48-bit scanning: 16 bits for each of three channels: red, green and blue.] For the kind of work we do as personal historians, 8-bits per channel is sufficient.

Save your scanned images in the .TIF format with no compression.

To autoexpose or not: I feel the purpose of scanning is to digitally capture a good facsimile of the original photograph [I also spend one day a week in our local archive center digitizing photo collections, so that’s where I am coming from on this.] Therefore, I do not want the scanning program to do any auto-adjusting or color restoration. I prefer to do that work in a photo editing program. [However, if a photo has severe color shifting, or very few mid-tones, I might make a couple of additional scans using the autoexposure or color restoration feature to use as a reference.] But when I’m scanning film I do let the software autoexpose.

To sharpen or not: Sharpening should be done at the very end of the photo enhancement workflow, not at the digital capture stage, so make sure the option is turned off.

What and how much to scan: Scan the entire image including the border. Many old prints have been cut crooked so scan with some extra space around it. The image can be straightened in a photo editing program.

Scan the back of the photo if there’s anything on it: handwriting, of course, but also photographers stamps, processing date stamps, even the numbers stamped on the backs of early 20th century photos. Use the same file name as the front of the photo, but add a –bk suffix to it. This is what it would look like: JXS-03-0038-bk.tif

Other considerations

Many old photos curl and sometimes the cover of the scanner won’t press them flat. Place a piece of museum board over them, then close the scanner cover.

If the photo has a deckled edge, place a piece of black museum board, or at least dark paper behind it before scanning. That makes it easier to extract the complete image later in a photo editing program.

And while you have the material in hand, scan any interesting photo album covers, end papers, envelopes, even three-dimensional objects: these might be used as graphic elements in the book.

No related posts right now but take a look at my resources for learning page where there are some free, downloadable .pdfs related to scanning and photo enhancement.

As more of our photographic images reside in the virtual world, we have not yet developed new systems for keeping track of them. I worry that a generation or more of photographic images will be lost. Here are two books that offer a new system for the digital era.

In the digital shoebox: how to organize, find, and share your photos, Sarah Bay Williams applies her experience coordinating hundreds of thousands of digital images for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science to the problem of organizing collections of personal digital photos. This is the first book I’ve seen that provides a methodical, step-by-step approach that anyone can follow to organize their digital photos from the camera to a final print. This book is written for personal or family photos, but is a good introduction into the methodology of digital archiving.

Googling the term “digital asset management” tends to turn up software recommendations or deadly-dull academic treatises. In The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers – 2nd Edition, Peter Krogh steps away from the bells and whistles of specific software and outlines a methodology [here’s that word again – guess I’m big on it] that, once implemented, can migrate to any software system. Krogh’s book is written for professional photographers and may seem like overkill for organizing personal images, but, like Williams’ book, reading it creates a head-shift and offers a way of thinking about these virtual objects.

Both authors stress two elements key to the smooth functioning of their system: file naming conventions that work for any image brought into the system, and a methodical workflow that is executed consistently whenever images are added to your computer.

Often the resistance to getting a handle on digital images is figuring out how to name the files, where to store them, what to do first, how to handle variations of an image, etc. Granted, it does take some up-front time thinking through the system and some practice getting it to become automatic, but this is one of the things I refer to as “think once, execute many times.”

You might be interested in some of my other book recommendations on my resources for learning page.

Hence, this post about the role of the photo editor in a book project. I don’t mean photo editing software; I’m talking about a breathing, thinking, discerning human being with a feel for both the content and emotion of a photograph as well as the ability to see through the image as it is currently presented and imagine how it might be cropped, enhanced, toned or otherwise manipulated to achieve the effect she wants.

This is a job that used to have its own title among newspaper and publishing people. The photo editor’s job was to select the photos to be included in the newspaper, magazine, or book. It’s one of those old fashioned print production roles that has lost its title, but not its importance. [Google “photo editor” and all you’ll get is software; I had to add the phrase “select photos for publication” to find the link above.]

Suzanne spent hours online sifting through the vast offerings of istockphoto.com. She was able to imagine how they would all appear when they were toned to the same sepia value so she wasn’t distracted by original colors. She also had to envision the photos cropped to a square format and determine what part of the image was key to what she wanted to say. Here’s a sampling of before & afters:

For personal historians, there is a far smaller universe of possibilities. The photos available for your book are only what the family has in their own collection. [Or are they? More on that in a future post.] That does not lessen the importance of the writer/project manager/designer providing a photo editor’s direction and eye for the strong visual.

• Who are the key people mentioned in the story?
• What time periods or ages are important in the story?
• What locations figure prominently in the story?
• Are there papers or objects that can add meaning to the story? Naturalization papers, military medals, a rusty license plate from a well-loved car?

After the key photos and memorabilia have been selected, look through the remaining photos with both an aesthetic eye—some photos might be included just because they are so strong visually—as well as with the eyes of future generations. What might seem commonplace to people growing up in a certain era—the Roaring 20s, the 1960s—can provide a wonderful opportunity to add another layer to the story by including the image and a descriptive caption explaining what is going on in the picture.

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