Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Photojojo has a great service for Flickr users — you sign up, authorize access to your Flickr account, and twice a month they send an e-mail message with a few of your photographs from a year earlier. The selection apparently uses Flickr’s interestingness formula, so you tend to get photographs that got a lot of views, comments, notes, etc.

Of course, this service doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself — it’s certainly easy enough to search your archives by date or browse through your sets to find pictures from last Halloween, last Thanksgiving, or whatever. I probably spend more time going through my old photographs than most people, all 4,000+ of them. But there’s something quite nice about getting these messages and see a little gallery of favorites from the previous year. Sometimes it makes me happy, and sometimes sad. Sometimes it reminds me to get in touch with a friend or family member and say something like “I was just thinking about the day we went to the orchard and bought that big pumpkin last year, remember how much fun we had?” Often it makes me want to go out and take more pictures.
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Instant Karma — “Before Polaroid fades into history, let’s remember how influential — and cool — the art of the snapshot, and the cameras themselves, could be” [Mark Feeney, Boston Globe : March 16, 2008]

Polaroid announced last month that they would no longer produce instant film was just an inevitable step in the long, slow decline of Polaroid and the world of instant photography. Instant film photography, killed off by digital photography. In the world of cameraphones, Flickr, photoprinters, who needs instant film cameras?

But Polaroid really was once so cool. In Feeney’ words:

“…there are those who remember when it was the Apple of its day: feisty, ubiquitous, pioneering. The Polaroid Land Camera was like the Mac, with all other consumer cameras PCs. There was the same sense of engineering superiority and cultural cachet.”

When I was a child, my engineer father had a serious camera with a light meter and a lot of accessories. He took slides and wrote the technical data on the frames, and he carefully ordered and organized the slides in trays for the projector. My mother had an old Brownie box camera, later replaced by an Instamatic, totally point-and-shoot. She had some of her older photographs in albums and baby books, but most of her pictures were just tossed into shoeboxes, undated and unlabeled.
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“History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world’s first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball… and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race.” [Sputnik, the Fiftieth Anniversary]

Fifty years ago, I was sitting on the back porch of our house in Dedham, Massachusetts, playing with some little plastic Disney characters. I was lining them up on the floor of the porch, using the gaps between the floor boards to divide the space into different “houses,” so I could pretend to have them visit each other. I was making Donald Duck knock on the door of Mickey Mouse’s house when my father came outside to talk to me.
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