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In Hungary, we have a project that has been building up for over a decade now. A couple of guys started archiving old pictures they have found in house clearances. All sorts. Everything from before 1990, I think. Family pictures. Vacations, sport events, cultural events. Pictures from wars and revolutions.

You can browse it for free. There are always stories how people recognised distant relatives. How the locations where the pictures were taken have been identified. They have over a 100.000 pictures now properly digitized and archived. We havedonated my great-grandfather’s pictures from WWI.

They also do thematic exhibits as well. I have been to one last year and it was great. There is something serene about the whole project.
(fortepan.hu , in case you are interested)

With all the blooming interest in DNA testing and genealogy such an archive will only become immensely valuable in the next decade.

It’s very funny to me in a way that the page titled “Pictures of You” has a person reflecting on how a life can be reduced down to photographs in a box.

If I am not mistaken, the title is a reference to a song. “Pictures of you, pictures of me hung upon your wall for the world to see”

Really? I was assuming it was a different song entirely. Pictures of You by the Cure, from their Disintegration album.

Especially since these pictures are, like, the opposite of being hung on a wall for all to see.

From one of my favorite songs, “O Sumer!”

“Our works have all faded, our kings but a list; the faintest of ghosts, we won’t even be mourned. It was by creation we hoped to exist, yet all we created lies shattered and scorned…”

http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/O_Sumer.html

Nice. Reminds me of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

Yep, that’s where my brain went as well.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

If they’re dated, such photos are hugely useful to historians to see how people dressed, what life was like–or at least how people presented themselves, in the days before candid photos were possible. Not sure if an historian who doesn’t know who you are getting research value out of your family photo album is better or worse, but it happens a lot.

I always find it sad when old pictures and the like get thrown out because the owner who cared about them is no longer with us. I mean, these are things the original owner found important to remember, and then they’re just forgotten.

Thomas has a hard time balancing sentimentalism against pragmatism.
Honestly, I think most of us struggle with that.

Is anyone here a fan of “White Rabbit”, by Jefferson Airplane?

*Singing*

…Go ask Alex, I think she’ll know.

it wasn’t on this page but thank you for introducing me to the term chucklefuck so that i was able to refer to a transphobe as señior chucklefuck.

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