new obsession alert

Vintage photo albums and my archive anxiety.

Recently I’ve started flirting with not film photography, the act, per se (because I remember taking my high school’s supposedly cool photo class and getting immediately bored with calculating f-stops), but more so film photos as personal archival object.

To be fair, I have always had a weird complex about maintaining “personal archives,” whether it was back during my teen iPod days when I didn’t “trust” iTunes and therefore spent a summer meticulously burning my entire MP3 library onto ~100 blank CDs that I stored in a giant binder in my bedroom (cue vivid sense memory of how overheated my mom’s laptop got from doing this), “just in case.” (I would love to say I still own that binder, but it for sure got thrown out during one of my parents’ two moves in the last decade. There are Library of Alexandrias everywhere for eyes to see).

For as long as I’ve remembered/first began journaling in the pages of my Harry Potter daily planner, I’ve had this intense certainty that I would one day lose my memories and therefore grip on reality (I am sure the whole drive to be a writer is simply the professionalized neurosis of leaving little Hansel & Gretel crumbs in order to self-prove existence). My journals have always been handwritten, but since iPhone singularity my photos have always lived on iCloud and Google Photos (and, for a particularly neurotic time, Dropbox too).

It wasn’t until I started chatting with technologists like Mindy Seu that I understood the more rational imperatives for a personal archival practice, primarily around bald, banal fact, as Seu put it to me a few years ago, that like obviously Google Photos will not be around for that long, relatively speaking. Probably not for our entire lifetimes, even. And most likely, we will not exactly get a courtesy email when that shit goes offline and dissolves years of our memories into ether. Teen Delia was right to have her suspicions. (Of course, on the list of things that may not be around for as long as we’d like, Google Photos does not exactly rank that high considering more pressing various sociopolitical to planetary concerns, etc.)

Earlier this year, I started about all this more in earnest when the LA fires were raging, especially as I read dispatches from people who’d either had time to save their family photo albums or tragically had not. So I started looking online to see what was in vogue for Photo Album Solutions these days, because at least having physical albums around to potentially pick up and run with seems more within my control than whether Google decides to sunset its storage offerings one day. It’s such a personal, crotchety form of techno-pessimism, to trust neither the longevity nor intentions of a tech company more than the onerous but tangible alternatives. The analog apologist lives within us all.

Anyway, the actually useful part of all this is that I’m here to report that the modern Photo Album Solutions are unfortunately all EXTREMELY MID. The biggest options in the game (okay, Google) are all centered around these swagless, overly designy custom photo books in annoying millennial colors; it’s the Rizzolification and Moleskinthesis of print aesthetics all at once. I cannot imagine paging through any of these with any of the pleasure that I do when peeling apart the laminated pages of the family albums of my youth. These “albums” look like thinly embodiedi Pad images; sacred texts require a grubbiness, a tactility. Or at the very least, they should not look like that.

So. I took a spin on eBay a few months ago and located a cache of pre-aughts doorstoppers that looked so familiar I could cry. I put in an offer for one, then found out a few weeks later that I had accidentally bought all six in the “lot.” And so a new summer obsession begins. The first one I’m filling up is a gift, stuffed with photos that are still so relatively fresh that it seems ridiculous to think of them as “archival” at all. I’m still trying to trust that this impulse is worthwhile, that preservation is itself alchemical. If you can’t make it last, at least make it real.

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Up next on Delia’s analog crisis: Did you know that those Kodak disposable cameras are like $33 at Duane Reade? I bought a pair of them on whim for some trips and realized that each exposure comes out to more than $1 apiece when you factor in the costs of getting them developed. Personal imaging economics now in for an interesting experiment: will such a scarcity mindset make for more valuable photos and therefore also more valuable sensations of The Experience?

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