Plant Hunters!

My dad was very keen on Alpine Garden Plants and after he retired he was able to go on Alpine Garden Holidays to many parts of the world. Today we've made some rather ruthless decisions about what happens to thousands of his slides. We asked my brother to sort through them first because he went on some of the same trips and I think he's taken a couple of small slide boxes back with him to the US but he left us with at least another dozen ring binders full of slides. Unlike, letters or correspondence, images on their own don't tell stories ... and we didn't go on these trips so it's really hard to engage with the images.

Over the years he's used his slides to give talks and presentations, but those notes are not with the slides. he visited Patagonia, Chile, North America, Iran, Turkey, NZ, China, Tibet, Russia to name but a few and clearly had a wonderful time, but so few of the slides were of people or places - the things I tend to relate to.

It's made me realise how much the photographs we take encapsulate our personal memories and that those memories are lost if we don't have a means of sharing them. Now we have entered the digital era we have thousands and thousands of images in our possession. I've already been thinking about the volume of rubbish images I've accumulated during my 3+ years of blipping and whether in future I should only blip when I have an image I really want to share. I also wonder if we shouldn't do more with the images that represent special moments in our lives. A photographer friend (an ex blipper) has created two books using Blurb - it seems like a great idea to me. (As does deleting thousands more images from my hard drive!)

p.s. I think the images above were taken on a visit to Chile
p.p.s I've been scanning a few of the images that I saved.