My Life in Pictures

I like words. I write. I am writing. I have written. See what a dab hand I am at conjugating verbs. It turns out, though, that I do an awful lot of pictorial recording, too.

My laptop contains 21,076 photographs.

This fact came to my notice because I recently uploaded all of these photos to The Cloud  (funny terminology, isn't it; makes me think that if it builds up too much, cumulus-style, we could have a storm, coloured pixel-drops raining down and making puzzle-puddles on the pavement. Disaster.). A friend had mentioned a new app that safely, securely, and, critically, limitlessly, stores photos, cost-free if accessed prior to a rapidly-approaching deadline. 'Great,' I said. 'Please send me the link. I'll get right on it.' She did, and I did: I began uploading. And kept uploading. And kept uploading.

At first I thought there was some mistake, some glitch, and I emailed the company. 'I must have pressed a wrong button,' I told them  (using words, not pictures). 'Your program has been running for over 24 hours and shows no sign of finishing. And for some reason it reports that I have more than twenty thousand pictures. That can't be right. What to do?' Reassurance came from their helpful customer-service person, or perhaps persona.

'There, there,' Ariel replied (approximately). 'In fact, you do have more than twenty thousand pictures. It takes a long time. Sit back and wait.'

Three days later, program still running, the purple pop-out window cheerfully reported that 18,072 of the 21,076 photographs had reached their heavenly destination. I sat back and continued waiting. And wondering. This laptop is only about five years old. Downstairs, buried in the basement, is my old desktop hard-drive, which stores photographs from the days when prints came back from Boots or Costco or Walgreen's along with a CD of electronic duplicates. And there were another two thousand-odd pics stored on my iPhone (four years old).  Plus of course the endless boxes of antique, solely-paper-printed pictures.

Why, I ask myself? Really, why on earth do I take and insist on keeping so many pictures? Is this urge to preserve images to do with human nature, an imperative that has been with us since we adopted and adapted to the practice of using tools? I wonder just how many cave paintings actually existed. Or does my photo-mania reflect a modern culture-bound syndrome? I know I'm not alone, though perhaps I am on the extreme end. Surely some anthropologist-- not me, obviously-- has given these questions some serious thought.

Lascaux ...or iPhone? 

I told the friend who first pointed me toward this wonder-app about my horror in confronting the results of my snapping habit. 'Ha!' she retorted. 'I've uploaded 82,000 images.' I'm not so extreme, then. Is this cause for relief, or for greater concern?

Really, we're all nuts. And that's my professional anthropological opinion.