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 with the smell of old books. Inside were 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 illnesses and sometimes these photographs were the only leftovers of these family members. The sentimental value of these images was extremely high and I can literally see someone sitting there and putting those memories together. The thought touches me. The album had the function of documenting the existence of a family. While the family photo album is very personal on the one hand, it is also very universal on the other hand because the events depicted are very similar in all families. The strong sentimental value it has accounts for the family members themselves only. For other people it can be completely uninteresting. I like to look at other peoples albums very much and while I do that I take on the position of the person that collected these images. And by looking at the images you can also learn about the person who put them together and acted as a curator of family memories. I also very much like the haptic element of the album itself. You can see the work that's been put into it. It's individual in size, material, weight, thickness and even smell.

I guess what's interesting for me is the strong interest in peoples stories and biographies. And I like the idea that a family album is actually completely useless. It's only function is a sentimental one: to preserve memory.