Paula's Media Pet

Audio Cassettes

It's unbelievable how much time of my teenage years I spent gathering music on tapes. I recorded music from the radio onto cassettes and decorated these tapes with images I cut out of magazines. writing each song on the inside of the cover I had designed. I would go to the library and rent out tapes in order to copy them. I was so happy I had a double cassette player with a recording function so I could copy one tape to another. And that's what I did. It was the ultimate proof of friendship, if not of love, to compile a mix tape with all your favorite songs for your friend. It took an entire afternoon to do that. I loved it.

The analogue family photo album

Intro

The family photo album is something I vividly remember. A heavy red or black thick and big leather book with stiff black pages. Inside black and white photos with white deckle edges, showing major life events from the first baby steps to the first day at school, the first bike ride, holidays, birthdays, weekend trips and family members in all different combinations, adolescence, early adulthood and until the next generation enters the picture. Further back in the album the images became colorful though only magenta seemed to be the color most resistent to fading. Each page had a handwritten note with key information on them: place, date and name. Between each thick black page was a sheet of transparent waxed paper with an imprinted pattern that reminded of a spider web. How funny that actually is. As if the dust of time had already settled on those old-fashioned albums while there were still in use...

Specificity

The photo album I'm talking about here, are the old-fashioned ones that were self-made by a family member. The images were chosen by that specific person, put into an order and glued into the album. Then hand-written information is added about the image such as date, name and place of the image. Within the photo album itself you can trace the development of the medium of photography. While some of them start out with images from the early days of photography maybe even with a Carte de Visite later in the album you might find polaroids and color photography. Depending on the timespan of the album, it also tells a history of photography. Also the disappearing of the analogue photo album, where images were glued and notes were hand written, is part of the process of the changing of the medium to a digital era. What draws me to these old fashioned albums is the fact that I know how rare pictures were in the days that these albums were created. People died young more often due to wars or illness and sometimes these photographs were the only leftovers of these family members. The sentimental value of these images was extremely high.

The family photo album is very personal on the one hand while it is very universal on the other hand. It functions as a document of the existence of a family. It can have a strong sentimental value, but only for the family members themselves. For other people it can be completely uninteresting. I like the ambiguity of emotional value

Events depicted are often similar

Each album is very specific because it is made by an individual with certain affinities. Where in one album you might find more images on a particular person than