13) From the many to the few without an answer

13) From the many to the few without an answer

Worse is to come. In an email an advertisement says: ‘Instagram may have turned us all into adept photographers, but it is smartphones that encouraged the masses to photograph their daily lives with their integrated cameras. For many, every event or scenery has to be documented and photo and video libraries keep growing accordingly.

The result: when looking for a picture or video, we often need to browse though thousands of photos or videos stored on our mobile device.

Flayvr is a free application that accesses your photo library and then automatically organizes your photos into separate albums and offers tools for quick, one-click sharing to social networks.’

Cees and Sylvia are the kind of travellers Chantal and I want to be. They’ve just been to South East Asia again, their favorite travelling ground. After dinner Cees shows his new Ipad and sweeps through his picture-load, hundreds of them fly by. A fraction still of all the pictures he has made during his travels.

The sun sets over the Mekong, a buffalo sniffs at the camera, a flower is blooming,  majestic mountains rise in the far distance, the setting sun shines a red light on the abandoned beach, an elephant in a pond, a rattan table carries a glass of Tiger beer.

And on and on it goes. Sunset after sunset, one bungalow more beautiful than the others, friendly smiling locals, a simmering stew on a charcoal fire.  Green valleys, black hills, clear blue skies. Cees is sensitive enough not to show them all to us. He is but one of the many millions of people possessing Ipads, smartphones or what have you got for information storing gadgets.

One death is a tragedy a thousands deaths are statistics. Quantity changes quality. That goes for pictures too. The rare pictures of long gone relatives are interesting like that of my fathers father and -mother in the Dutch East Indies.

As I write this a tweet comes by saying: Not long ago your aunt would show a map with photos. Two rolls at the max. Now she has an iPad with 6000 photos

Multiply the images that are thus recorded by millions and you get some scope of the growing data-mountain that awaits our children. The urge to record what we observe leaves us with a pile of digital excrement.

I don’t use the word excrement offhandedly. The use of images in our daily life has become overwhelming. On Facebook for instance people share more and more photo’s, pictures, drawings, paintings and cartoons not made by themselves.

My Facebook friend Ruth shows a photo of a glacier hemmed in between huge rocks. I like it and share it on my page soon to see that Dorith likes it too and has shared it on her page. No sooner have I registered this or I forget it because of an other picture that begs sharing. A cat dangling from the head of a huge and friendly dog. And this in less than two minutes.  

These are pictures you don’t keep. As yet the capacity for information-storage is growing but the supply-side is growing at an even greater speed.  The need to order these data will soon become pressing as the question arises what to do with this bewildering amount of personally gathered data. A question that confronts me as I’m sorting out the color-slides of Chantal.

12) Don’t search too hard, you might find more than you hoped for

12) Don’t search too hard, you might find more than you hoped for

Vacuum-cleaning I look under my desk. Two big, red cardboard boxes. A fraction of a second I don’t know what is inside or why they stand there. Then I remember they contain photos, hundreds of them. They too await ordering, to be  cataloged, a text to be added.

Warning! Don’t look into these boxes with old pictures. If you find them you find stacks of them. On some of these pictures of people whose identity is impossible to determine. Sending you head on to a new track of information gathering. Or you know who it is but you know next to nothing of this person.

Take the mother of my maternal grandmother, my great grandmother, Jeannet Hülliger. With her slightly slanted eyes, a brooch in the form of a miniature Javanese keris and her high cheekbones she shows all the indications of a mixed racial parentage. Grandma ‘Moes’ as she was called and off you go, surfing the Internet for information about great-grandma Moes.

Loathing and disgust fill my heart as I come to understand how much work there is to be done if I were to take my quest serious. Great-grandma Moes has a Swiss name, Hülliger and she marries someone who is also of Swiss origin, Alphons de Sturler. Was he a pure bred European? Or was he also of Eurasian extraction?

When I finish my project I must write a book about the do’s and don’ts of neatly storing and labelling the images of your life.

The pictures that I make after September 1999 - the month that Marike and I meet -  don’t pose a problem as Marike can select and arrange them. Mostly they show her, her being pregnant, her becoming more and more pregnant and finally our first born Mijntje. To a lesser extend the same happens be it less documented when Maike is due to arrive. I also make a short sequence of our baby-boy who was aborted due to an affliction called acephaly. His skull didn’t close and his brains dissolved.

More in the realm of fun-pictures are the ones we make in Madeira where we stay in what is for me by far the nicest hotel I have ever visited. It is an old building that stands on a hill. To reach the entrance you walk through a garden full of Angel Trumpets. From the dining room you have a captivating view of the capital Funchal.  Aside from the romantic surroundings the paint is fading, water-pipes are rusty and the sink smells. The owner tells us it is probably the last season she can exploit the hotel. She is too old to continue and nobody wants to take it over.  

The street leading to the hotel is so steep that we walk it back to back as Marike has become absurdly big. I push her upwards walking backwards. It is a way to get attention indeed.

Photographs are a seductive lot. I have a few empty photo-albums so I could start pasting them into the album. First sorting them out year by year, then from month to month. Afterwards I will start with the slides. Postponing is a appealing strategy.

My good friend Cees visits us and I tell him about my problem which slides to keep and which to destroy. Cees, Chantal and I have been in Flores 1984. He asks me: ‘Remember that time our bus was stuck because a bridge was broken?’ 

Accidentally I have seen a picture of a exuberantly painted bus on Flores and local guys dragging around logs. He continues: ‘We had befriended an Englishman and we have a discussion about the art of travelling looking at these guys trying to repair the bridge. Like even if they cannot fend the bridge and we will not be able to arrive at our intended destination, we still have enjoy travelling.’ I remember the broken bridge, but the Briton? No. These boxes also are full of forgotten memories.