Photos from a passed life

Since the 3d of June 1996, when there was a fire in the flat below mine, I've dragged with me a banana box with all my photos. After the fire we had to be evacuated and most of my stuff was damaged by the smoke from the fire. My photos was ok because they were stored in their paper envelopes. Since then, this box has followed me everywhere I moved, without being sorted, it's heavy and takes up space and I have avoided to go through it because of the thousands of photos that are all in a mess and needs sorting.

I was in Spain in 1995 and there are specific photos from the trip somewhere in the box that I want to look at before our trip to Spain next month, where we will visit some of the same place I visited then. 

So I took a deep breath, opened the box and started looking. While doing that, I might as well throw away all the photos that are rubbish, duplicates or when I don't know where they are from or what the motif is. I'm half way through the box now and has already thrown away close to a thousand photos. I don't sort them or actually look closely on them this time, I just decide, bin or keep. The looking through closely and keeping the ones I really want to keep can take place later, when there aren't so many. 

There are many left to look through,  as you can see, but it's already given me some good moments, it's a little like working through a trauma and at the same time finding a lot of valuable nuggets that brings me joy. I'm already looking forward to the next time I will look through the box and do my final decisions on which to keep and how to store them.

How do you deal with your old paper/plastic photos?