The Playful Antiquarian

My orange childhood

March 23rd, 2005

Today, in my preservation management class, while discussing preservation microfilming and digitization, we briefly discussed the issue of the fading of color photographs from the 1960s and 1970s. It was an oddly apropos discussion for this week, as only yesterday I brought a baby photo to work for scanning for an upcoming staff party and noticed how much the photo had deteriorated during the course of almost three decades.

Much of my early childhood is now orange — not only in the Kodak prints in photo albums and boxes, but also in my memory. With only photographs (and a handful of family stories) to recreate my New York childhood, my view of things is easily distorted. In my memory, my great-grandparents’ brownstone in Brooklyn is pinkish orange, as are my first toys, my first birthday cake, and all of the other objects and moments of my earliest years. Perhaps, this is why whenever I am in New York City now, the colors seems unusually bright, sharp, and somehow wrong.

In many ways, it is too late to preserve my own childhood, but if I ever have children, I think I will follow the advice our guest lecturer gave today and take one black and white photo of my children every year. Black and white, at least, leaves something for the imagination.

Further reading

For information on preserving family photographs, visit the Library Preservation at Harvard “Caring for Personal Collections” webliography.

Entry Filed under: Personal Miscellany