So, What Now?
Flynn Marr 9 March 2026
I am 84 years old. All my life , at least since high school, I have taken pictures as a hobby. For reasons I cannot recall I began saving my negatives from the beginning and now I have almost every negative I took from the 1950’s through 2004 and every digital image file since. Lightroom tells me that I have north of 154,000 images in my collection. Very few are what you might call “art”. Most are simply memories I have collected along the way and wandering through all of these images brings me intense pleasure. My mind fills with memories I did not know I had and emotions from the time. If I put on the music from the 50’s as well is is a totally immersive experience.
But that is where the question comes into play. The collection holds considerable value for me but it also represents a real problem which can be summed up as “So, What Now?”.
You see, at my age I know I have only a few years of life left, which is the normal course of events, and I have to face the reality that my collection of images will pass out of my hands. I will lose control of them and I really have no idea who will end up with them. Let me try to illustrate the problem with a few pictures.
This is the cover page in my Father’s album. He was very talented as an artist although he never did anything with it.
My father took photographs when he was a young man. It was never a hobby for him but simply snapshots of moments that were important in his life. Like me he found that simple snapshots had the ability to bring memory flooding back and establish connection with past events. So he took pictures but he not save them with the interest I did. He was overtaken by a World War, then a family, then a mortgage and he never got back to his photographs.
As a child in the late 1940’s and early 50’s I remember an old Kodak box camera around the house, envelopes
of prints and negatives thrown in boxes, and occasionally having to look into the sun while he took a picture. Remember when the exposure instructions always said the photographer should have the sun at their back (and thus in the eyes of the subject)?
This is a page from my Father’s photo album.
The old camera and the boxes of pictures are gone now. I left for college and never again lived under my father’s roof and over the years the pictures faded away just as the memories did. Today a few prints have come down to me, bits and pieces of memory that have lost their connection to reality. One thing I have is an album that my father created beginning in 1934 which would make him 17 years old at the time. It is filled with photographs from a time when film was sent for developing by the druggist and the pictures coming back with the negatives were contact prints.
On the album page to the left are five photographs. Starting with the one top center and going clockwise lets look at them. In the horse drawn cart the faces are not sharp but I think the man is my father. The girl is Loretta but I have no idea who she was or where or why the picture was taken. The folks in the picture on the upper right are unknown to me. Below are four girls but, again, I have no idea who they are or where. The two men in the lower left are my Father, on the
right, and some one I don’t know. Finally, the top left is my grandfather but I have no idea where he is or why except for the label, “Mt. Baker”.
Now think about this: that is all I know about these photographs. One generation removed and these pictures are a mystery to me. To my children they would be completely irrelevant and put out in the garbage. So much for the important moments in our lives. But let’s zero in closer.
The picture on the bottom left of the album page is shown on the right. The young man to the right in the picture is my Dad and he is standing with someone who is obviously a good friend. I have no idea where they were, where they were or what the occasion for the photograph was.
To me the photograph is interesting because it is a picture of my Father at about the age of 17. But it holds no other meaning for me. However, to my Father this picture evoked memories, friendships, emotions. The impact of the picture was totally different for him and me. And for you it is a totally pointless image. It is not art, nor is it memorable, nor relevant to anything in your experience. It is one of millions or even billions of snapshots that are irrelevant to you. Meaning in a photograph is very personal and perishable. It dies with the creator or their contemporaries with few exceptions. With death the meaning evaporates like data in RAM memory when you turn off the computer.
This is the picture from the lower left on the album page. It shows my father with an obviously close and, to me, unknown friend.
‘If the image could be construed as art, or if it contained historical information , or was newsworthy, then it would have a wider meaning to more people. But few snapshots rise to this level. My Father’s certainly don’t.
So, keeping all of that in mind, let’s look at my problem. I have 154,000 images, many just snapshots of family and friends and, I hope, a few of reasonable artistic quality. I also have two websites about photography, one for family and the other more public for my art and camera collection.
I have a wife, children, grandchildren, all without an interest in photography or computers. They will not want to run my websites. They are technical, complex and largely irrelevant to their lives. My daughter is an execuor in my will and she has said she dreads the day she has to sort this all out. Lightroom is complex to the uninitiated and has a monthly cost. My websites are more complex and cost even more. For the life of me, I cannot see my family wanting to carry all of this on after I am gone. Not a chance. I am in my 84th year now. My Father lived almost to 101 and my mother to 96 and I am still in good health. So I figure that I have 10 to 15 years to figure out “What Now?”.
On a more philosophical approach, we all die and are forgotten. We will be remembered for two or three generations at most and in that time memories of us will fade to naught. The events in our lives seem so real, so important, to us but they will not be remebered. It may be a little arrogant but I am not happy about fading from memory as my father’s childood has. But what to do about that.
My camera collection will pass on to other collectors and be enjoyed into the future. But it occurs to me that my collection of images is different. They are a record of a period of time in the history of my family and they will be of interest to those who come ofter me if I prepare them correctly. Just passing on a massive collection of prints, negatives and digital images is not enough. Chances are that no one will have the skill set or interest to dig into them and create something from them. They will be of little interest if future observers know nothing about who the people were, where they were, and what they were doing. The images must have context to fix them in time and place.
And therein lies my problem: What do I do with my collection to keep it relevant? How do I protect my family from having to deal with websites, computers, electronic databases. I have not come across anyone writing about these issues online or in print and that is surprising to me because these are important questions. How do you arrange matters to maximize the future relevance of your photo collection? Since I know of no other discussions of what to do I guess I will have to develop my own plan. Let me think about that for a while and then in a follow-up post, which I will bookmark here when it is ready, I will give you my thoughts on such a plan.
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