4) The burning house

4) The burning house

‘What will you take with you when your house is on fire?’ How often have I not seen or heard this question asked in interviews? How often do people not say: ‘the family pictures’. That reaction belongs to an era in which pictures were costly in several ways.

Photo’s are normally made of people and places one wants to record or parties worth remembering. At least that is what you think when the shutter snaps. Often you feel sad when you see the results, but sadder still you will be when you lose pictures made with affection. Like Marike and me.

Chantal and I live together, Marike and I get married. A friend makes a movie of the ceremony and the party afterwards. A lovingly made movie we have lost somewhere in transit from one address to the other.

When our first daughter, Mijntje, is born in 2001 we buy a film-camera. We shoot also the first year of Maike 2003-2004. That camera is stolen with the cassette still inside. So much of importance to us alone, for Marike and me now, for the kids later. Gone.

No one will ever find these films of any interest but for us they are invaluable. Gone. Curse the thief who has stolen our memories.

As long as camera’s are expensive family pictures fit in a box. But when I die my kids will inherit a staggering amount of photo’s, both digital and analogue, some movies, hundreds of color-slides. Besides these images there is also all the written material of a very personal character: diaries, official documents, agenda’s, letters and of course in my case all the digital archived newspaper articles I wrote as a journalist for the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.

We are talking about personal data amassed on a staggering scale. Never before in history has man had the opportunity to record his life in such a quantitative way. But to what effect? What do these data tell us?