Digging through the past
I spent some time this afternoon transferring old files from creaking hard drives into my laptop, out of curiosity to see what I could recover. Thinking back on my history with photography, I could bring to mind specific photographs that I had taken in 2007 to 2009, when I was around 14 to 16, first trying out photography with a hand-me-down Nikon. I all but knew that all the files were lost back in 2011–2012 when I shifted from a Mac to a Windows laptop and just failed to tend to the files left on the Mac until – if memory serves – the laptop just died one day. Still, one could hold out hope.
I scrounged around for a suitable cable and plugged in the first hard drive. A blue light lit and the disk whirred. But my laptop couldn’t read it. I was about to give up when I pressed down on my bed (this whole operation was done on my sheets) and the hard drive was angled. That seemed to do the trick. I went into the drive and saw only two folders: ANIME and work. The ANIME folder is a separate story. I went through work and saw only some of the more polished pieces done in 2010 onwards. None of the earlier photographs that I could recall (I was hoping especially to find the photographs from a trip to Italy my parents took us on in middle school). Disappointed, I transferred the files onto my laptop just for good measure.
The hard drive had to be cajoled to give up its bytes by holding it up, letting gravity work on the cable.
I half suspect that I had made the conscious choice only to keep these files. The broken promise of memory once offered by those photographs left a bit of an ache.
On to the next one. There was more promise here. A Pictures folder with a custom icon – I recall having done this on my old MacBook Pro. Maybe this would contain the lost files!
At first glance, it contained some less polished work, but none of the photographs that I wanted to see. And, to be frank, a lot of it was just disappointing – I had taken a bit of a “conceptual” turn in my later teenage years when I should have been practicing technique. It was, I think, ultimately a good thing that I did not try to pursue an art education – I would have been insufferable!
The best lead I had was a folder with the promising name iPhoto Library. Created 30 April 2007, modified 21 December 2010. I used Photos to import this folder and while there were some photographs in there, so much more was missing. Or so I thought, until I searched around for a tool that could extract image files from some of these databases. Running the folder through the program, it was able to retrieve thousands of thumbnails, tiny, unusable images, but enough to give me a sense of what was there before. Breadcrumbs for my memory. Here they were, some of my early photographs! Many were terrible, some were passable, but what was important was that they had been taken. Still, it was probably a good thing that they were so tiny – a mercy not to be confronted too forcefully with the folly of youth.
It was good to clear out these hard drives once and for all. But the sense that I was left with, at the end, was largely that of disappointment. These were many wasted years, in between, from my early enthusiasm in the late 2000s, to the years of conceptual, high-brow intellectualism that would distract me from craft and purpose. A decision to pursue a more prosaic degree – itself valuable and an experience I would not trade away – eventually relegated photography to a hobby, and not even one actively pursued at that. Wasted time? In one sense. But we have the life we have, and there is much for me to be grateful for.