I wish I had taken more pictures

Now, this is a new one on me. Normally, I think that I live my entire life wading through chaos. I’ve always been a hoarder. I’ve always been untidy. But recently, perhaps only over the last couple of years, I have unearthed within myself a tremendous desire to sort. To catalogue. To stack, and review. And to invest in smart, colour-co-ordinated storage solutions. ("Where are you going?" said my work friend Karen. "I’m off to buy some red magazine files for the study." I replied. "You’re what? It’s dark! Go home!" she spluttered. "No, really, Karen. Storage solutions are the new black. Trust me.")

And I have decided that of all the things that I love to sort, photos are my favourite things of all. I never used to sort my photos. I have a stash of pictures that go back to when I was about fifteen, and for years they have all been sitting rather dejectedly in boxes, being unloved and dusty. There were a couple of exceptions: a brief spate of putting around 20 into rather nasty, cheap, yellow and green albums when I was nineteen… a stack of them with sticky blue-tack marks on the back where they were put up on my wall every year at university… a couple, rather randomly selected, that were in frames around my room. But in general, my life was photo chaos. Taking a look inside one of the boxes revealed a crazily post-modernist, chrono-no-logical approach to images of my life. My sixteen year old self sipped champagne over her GCSE results, flanked on either side by pictures of me and my sixth form boyfriend, and a picture of Prague. A picture of my little sister peered curiously at a picture of a party from the second year: camera un-focussed … and probably a good thing, too. But no longer. For this year, I have taken control of my photo collection. I have formed order from chaos…. in fact, I am still forming order from chaos. The task is a huge one, and it’s ongoing. And god, I just love doing it.

I think there are several things behind this, and the reason I love sorting photos so much is that they all rather deliciously join together into the one activity.

The first is rather quotidian: it’s the inside-ness of it. The discrete-ness of the task. Although I have a lot of photos, they all fit inside two reasonably sized boxes, meaning I can hoof them both downstairs, and put them in front of the TV, and spend a delightful evening going through them, half-watching reality TV at the same time, basking in the simultaneous glow of multi-tasking, and guilt-free crappy TV watching. To sort my photos I don’t have to go outside into the cold (see ‘Weeding the garden’) I don’t have to don other clothes (see ‘Going for a run’) I don’t have to haul things about and get tired out (see ‘Finally sorting out the attic’). I can sit down, cup of tea within grabbing distance, chocolate hobnobs at my side, and get stuck in without pulling muscles, or inconveniencing myself.

Another reason I love sorting photos is just for the sheer soul-soothing kick of feeling as though I’m sorting my life out. One evening when I was putting our photos from India into an album, I was struck by the sudden thought that if I carried on at this rate, I’d have sorted out all of my photos, and also all of Jack’s, and then what would I do? Was the soothyness of the task, I wondered for a moment, linked to the after-effects of seeing a shiny row of filled photo albums… or was it somehow linked to the actual physical action of leaving through loose photos? Would I have to go back to the beginning and start to systematically take my pictures out of their albums, mix them up, and start again? My heart began to pound.

But – no! Just in time I remembered that photos are ongoing. Even as I fill up albums with pictures from 2002, I am still taking photos in 2006, which will in turn be processed, and need cataloguing. The obsessive compulsive part of my mind was at rest once more….

There is definely a ‘for posterity’ feeling here, too. I was talking to my friend about the joys of photo sorting, and she sighed and said, "You know. I have drawn a line under my photos, and I’m not even going to try to sort out any from before my holiday to Greece in 2004. All the ones after that I’m putting into albums. But before then I give up." She roused herself a little, "Still. I comfort myself that in the future, my biographer will have plenty of well-organised material from my diaries. So it’s not all bad." We both laughed.

But I think this masks a serious point. The point is not necessarily one about how future generations will view your life. But for me, there is an important aspect of laying things to rest in making a photo album. As I was sorting photos, I took the decision to include, rather than throw away, some pictures of me and an ex. That’s it: I can’t write him out any more. He’s definitely in my history. And fair enough, to be honest. I think keeping photos is a kind of remembering. A kind of acknowledging, and sometimes even a laying to rest. I felt quite emotional the night I went through my teenage photos. I looked at the teenage me in some of the pictures, and I wanted to reach into them and give her some advice. Tell her what not to do (what not to wear), and try to make things a bit better, or try to make her appreciate when things weren’t as bad as she thought. But it was also strangely liberating, to go through a period which seemed so difficult at the time, and to turn it into something chronological, something aesthetically rather lovely (even photographs of sullen-faced teenagers are still quite beautiful), and to turn something that often seemed so endlessly formless and repetitive into something with a narrative structure: a framework to bad times, a point at which you could say, yes, things got better.

And so I sorted. I sorted the pictures, and I sorted something inside me as well. I put all of the packets of photos in chronological order. And even doing that felt good: putting things where they should be, tracing clues to find dates for troublesome events…  figuring out the webs of relationships between certain haircuts, or friendships, or items of clothing, so that I could categorically say that was July 1999, and that one is May 2001. I wrote the date on the front of each photo wallet. Then I started on the collection of random photos: the one I processed with my best friend in the dark room at school, the individual ones I’d been given by my Mum, the one of himself that an awful ex gave me, which I wept over when he dumped me, the copies of pictures I’d begged from friends… I began to insert these pictures into my set of photo wallets.

Then I started at the beginning (well, not right at the beginning. There was one reel of film from when I was thirteen, and all the photos are awful, and I thought to myself, "Well, I do want some accuracy here, but at the same time, these are MY photo albums, so why do it to myself?" and I put those ones back in the box) and began to put them into albums.

There are still some inconsistencies. There was a bad moment one evening when I realised I was going to have to take out 20 pictures so I could re-insert 5 which I’d just realised were from the previoussummer, not the next. There is an overall policy decision about what Jack and I should do with his photos… luckily he doesn’t have many…. but at what point should they be integrated? The moment we meet? I mean, surely that would be too obviously an act of hindsight! … Talking of which, when I was putting my life aged seventeen into an album, Jack came and sat next to me on the sofa, and asked, rather timidly, "Do you think our kids will find it odd that we have pictures of you and your previous boyfriends?" I looked at him, curiously, and he knitted his fingers together, and went on, "It’s just that, well, my parents don’t have pictures of them before they were together." I took his hands, "I don’t think so. Partly, it’s that we all have more pictures now. And partly also, they’re what happened to me. It’s true. I did go out with some other people. But now we’re together." There’s obviously a leap around the pictures from the wedding, which are in other, rather larger and glossier albums. But generally, it’s going well.

When Jack and I went to see Avenue Q, I laughed myself silly the whole way through… apart from at one bit. There is one song called, ‘I wish I could go back to college’ which is basically a mid-twenties lament for carefree university days. This isn’t a stance I particuarly believe in, but the song was hugely entertaining, until at the end the main character sings, "I wish I had taken more pictures". Which still, even now, strikes me as a line full of incredible pathos.

I don’t think photos are just pictures. I think they’re little parts of the past. Little port-holes through which we can get occasional glimpses of the people we were, and the things we did. They are points of reference by which we can steer ourselves, and triangulate an idea of what was, what is, and what will be. They are some of the pieces which make up our patchwork quilt. And sorting out the last thirteen years of my life by going through my old boxes, and putting some of my favourite (and, let’s be perfectly honest here, most flattering) memories into lovely albums has made me, strangely, very happy.

with love, and best wishes for a merry Christmas,
therumtumtugger
xxxx