On Friday 20 Apr 2012 7:16:35 am Deepa Mohan wrote: > I got this interesting, er, view on another list to which I belong: > > http://www.cnngo.com/explorations/life/tell-me-about-it/james-durston-photo > graphy-has-ruined-travel-361992 > > Oh, I don't want to cut-paste the text as is the norm. > > Cheers, Deepa.
Deepa this is a half-full/half-empty situation. Personal memories last only so long as you live. Photographs live longer and give a far better insight into history that was the case before photography was invented. Both memories and photographs are important. I spent several weeks over that past few years digitizing and "reducing to jpegs" about 3000 photographs and negatives, both inherited from parents (from 1945 onwards) and my own from the 60s. I find that images of my parents' friends are worthless. But those of my parents and other relatives give me insights into their lives as a young couple. I now realize that my own children will find my friends' faces unfamiliar and those images will be worthy of discarding. But they will have some insight into their own origins by images of their parents from the 1960s. As an aside, I found a photo (a negative) of Lal Bagh from about 1945 taken from behind our house - the area between the lake and West Gate. There was only one tree in a place that is now a mini forest. Interestingly, if you search online for old images, you find that images from US and Europe are common from the early 20th century. Images from India are very rare - and are mostly those of royalty. This seems to reflect when photography became affordable to Indians. It looks like I am one of the few Indians who has a family record of photographs from the 1940s to 50s. Generalizing from social class, it is likely that my experience will be true for many older silk listers in India. But most Indians did not get cameras into their hands until the 1990s. shiv
