Some of my fondest childhood memories were watching old photographs come to life in my grandpa’s 35mm Kodak 650h projector. Each slide started with a satisfying click of the reel then finished with a story from decades ago.
We’d make popcorn and drink sweet tea or Coke while we all sat around and listened in rapt attention. Each slide was a new world. A different life. One locked away in a grainy 35mm slide forgotten by time, waiting to be reborn on a bumpy wall in Kalispell, Montana.
“This was moose hunting in Alaska with Max in 1979. It was too heavy to drag so we had to cut it up right in the river.” Click.
“This was Mother’s Day in 1967 or 1968 back when we lived in the old log house west of town.” Click.
“This was your mom and Melody and Rick. Probably the winter before. Your mom still has that white coat in her cedar chest.” Click.
Magical.
Part of the magic was in the rarity. Back then, you might only have one or two pictures that represent your time in a certain house. Part of the magic was in taking the time as a group to relive the moment.
The slides weren’t filled with professional-level photographs. They were raw, and that was part of the magic too. The scenery was beautiful, but it was the people and places that really mattered.
Each new slide was a moment frozen in time. Immortalized. They’d vibrate slightly and we’d use our imaginations to envision what the rest of the scene must have been like.
“Woah, I wonder what it was like to have been alive way back in 1968,” Me, in 1993. Click.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the magic.
We lost the rarity, the slightly off-kilter photographs that would later become awe in a child’s eye. As time marched on pictures became cheaper to print and keep. What seemed like an improvement in convenience quietly cheapened the experience. We became flooded with photos. There were simply too many to appreciate any single picture and we just didn’t have the time.
Reliving old moments became an individual activity and we lost much of the wonder of the slides.
The days of the entire family gathering around to watch the next slide click into focus were gone.
Today, everyone has a camera on them at all times with an endless roll of film waiting to be shot.
Instead of one magical slide, we have three-hundred pictures of the birthday party. Each scene captured from every angle, by fifteen different people. No moment is left precious or rare.
Then they sit, locked away on a phone. Only existing in the belly of an app. Not quite perfect enough to make social media, not quite off-kilter enough to delete.
Those lucky few shots that make it off the phone have a shelflife of the few seconds it takes to scroll past them.
When you have that one old photograph of your great-grandparents you treasure it. You look at it over and over. Contemplate it. You imagine what it was like to live at that time.
When you have access to hundreds of digital photos of even your loosest acquaintances the magic is lost. A single slide holds more emotional content than a thousand social media posts.
Timeless.
Slow it Down
I feel my life is a raging river and I’m desperate to slow it down before it spits me out into that endless sea. Part of the magic of the slides was how slowly they moved. How slowly time moved when you watched them.
You sat and imagined the world just beyond each slide. Every angle wasn’t available, but every angle wasn’t needed. You got a single slide and an anecdote, and that was enough.
There will be hundreds of pictures of me as a young man for my grandkids to look at. Will they take the time to be moved? Will there be any moments from my life that take their breath away? I fear the avalanche of social media posts will leave them overwhelmed and uninspired.
Instead of spending a few minutes daydreaming about what life was like on an old Honda Sabre in July of 2013 will they spend thirty seconds quickly glossing over an entire lifetime of photos? None of them rare enough to elicit a sense of wanderlust.
“This was at a family reunion in Montana in 2013 with my nieces and nephews. I rode all the way from Portland. Everyone thought I’d died at one point, but it was a different motorcyclist that had hit a deer. He was okay.” Click.
I wonder if we’ll look back on our lives as a series of chaotic stimuli each grabbing at our attention. I imagine we will if we don’t purposefully change the direction of our focus.
We’d all be better off if we learned to sit and watch the sun go down once in a while.
The way we look at photographs is a good metaphor for how we’ve traded deep meaningful moments of time for surface level instant gratification.
If we’re not careful our lives become a series of digital photographs, each blending into the next. Over-snapped but under-appreciated.
But, we can change course and live in the slides of an old Kodak projector. We can do our future grandchildren the service of living the type of life worth telling them about. We can do each other the service of taking the time to sit around and relive the moments we’ve captured.
It’s those moments that, years from now, we’d give anything to have a single slide of. To hear the click and tell an anecdote.
“This was at Tryon Creek State Park in 2020. It was your first time being up there for a real hike. One where you actually looked around. You laughed the entire time.” Click.
“This was outside our home in Portland. It was the first day of the year we could sit and play outside in the grass.” Click.
“This was your mom knitting that old sweater. When you’d go to bed she’d knit for hours. She gave away most of the things she made but she always wore that sweater.” Click.
Magical.
Social media can be great, but it’s a poor substitute for an evening looking at slides with loved ones. Let’s bring back the community aspect that makes photographs so special in the first place. Let’s get back to living in a slide.
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I would love to see all your old photos. I vaguely remember being at that old log house once in Montana to visit relatives I never knew 58 years ago. I think their names were Chester and Earlene or something like that.