The problem with anything analogue is that we just don’t have the time, or the technology, to deal with it any more.

I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of pictures and negatives. Year after year of birthdays and Christmases with the same themes of cakes, Champagne, party poppers and floors strewen with discarded wrapping paper. Before Elizabeth came along it was hard to tell one year from another. Even with her presence I couldn’t tell you which year they were taken in, it’s just a little easier to put them into some rough chronology.

I separate photographs from negatives and give up counting the prints when I reach the thousandth. It’s not the first time I have done this but then the sorting was done at a more painful time and the box was put away to be dealt with another day. Lost on these bits of celluloid are Nicola’s face, the band rehearsing before a show, my first car, holidays in France, my wedding, Elisabeth on my back as we walked in the Lake District.

To sort them out I would need a lightbox, a lupe to magnify them and the ability to get my brain around seeing this world inversely as a negative image. I would need to index and catalogue them and I would probably need more space to keep them rather than the old cardboard box where they rest now. Despite that effort it would still be hard to track down the one shot I wanted a week from now.

I probably have more digital pictures taken in recent years than I do ones taken on film. I store them on DVDs and I have them roughly catalogued. It is fast and easy to preview them as thumbnails and the images are positive and full colour. I don’t need to keep a large lightbox nor do I need to dust down the negatives before I scan them or remove the scratches when they are in Photoshop.

I doubt many of these pictures will ever been seen again. Most of them were snaps, many of them record a time long since past. Perhaps in a few years I will let go of the negatives but until then the problem can rest in this box.

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