Taking Photos

And discarding photos.

Arachova, Greece, where we caught the sunset on the drive to Delphi.

Today’s post will be on the shorter side (for me), as I’m traveling. That means I’ve been taking a ton of photos, which has got me thinking about — you guessed it, photos!

How much energy are we using?

I haven’t counted how many photos I’ve taken so far in Paris and Greece, but it’s a lot. I never got around to going through my photos from my trip last year to Barcelona, the Pyrenees, and Paris. (Lest you think I’m some kind of jet-setter, last time I’d been to Europe before then was 15 years earlier, and it had been 33 years since I’d been to Paris.)

I’m old enough to remember a time when we’d take a couple rolls of film with 24 or 36 photos on a trip, so we rationed them carefully. Now, we take many hundreds of photos on each trip — and hundreds more at home.

By some estimates, the average person may be taking 900 to 10,000+ photos per year (not surprisingly, Americans take way more than Europeans), for a global total of 1.8 trillion annually — or 5 billion photos per day. No one knows the exact number, but it’s big. Most of the photos are taken on smartphones.

Storing all those photos in the cloud uses up a lot of energy. Just uploading and downloading one photo, according to one source, is equivalent to leaving an LED light on for about 12 weeks, while storing photos can use as much energy as an entire household consumes in a single year. That sounds extreme, but I’ve seen this figure in more than one place. In any case, it’s a lot of energy and a contributor to rising energy demand.

Yikes! Clearly, I need to be going through my photos and deleting as many as possible. Getting to work on that now — I promise.

You look so happy!

You might look at a photo of me with my ex-husband and say, “You look so happy!”

And I might have been, depending on when the photo was taken. It wasn’t a miserable marriage; it just wasn’t right for me.

But I might not have been happy at any given moment, including a moment when a photo was taken. We tend to smile for the camera, and people think we must therefore be happy.

How many times have I looked at photos of smiling people and thought they were happy, without knowing what was really going on with them? How many times have I made that assumption about people IRL, without knowing what was really going on with them? Photos aren’t the only thing capable of distorting the truth.

Who are those people?

As my mother was pondering which books to keep when she moves to a different apartment in her assisted living facility, I noticed a photo album tucked away between my father’s coffee table books on architecture. I pulled it out so we could look through it.

So many tiny black and white photos! For reasons photographers will know, larger prints were more expensive back in the 1940s and 1950s, when many of the photos in the album were taken. There were some I’d seen of my grandparents, some of relatives in Italy, and some of my parents when they met in graduate school. Others I somehow hadn’t seen of my dad looking so thin and debonair, and my mom looking sultry in her late-1950s cropped hair and cropped jeans. I’m traveling now so I can’t scan any of the photos to post here. But take it from me — my mom was pretty cute.

There are also photos of my parents with other people and photos of groups of other people. When I ask my mom who they are, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t remember.

We’ll never know who some of those people were. They’re the remnants of the life my parents had before my sister and I were born. The life that doesn’t seem quite real because we weren’t in it. There’s so much about that life we’ll never know about. The photos of random strangers will be tossed, and that will be that.

I guess that means I should be labeling my photos. But I don’t have kids, or even nieces and nephews, so who will care about these photos when I’m gone? They’ll be just hundreds — thousands — more in the piles and piles of online photos that are crowding our world.

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