Wednesday 19 December 2018

Making memories at Christmas - or not

Although I'm interested in how we record and preserve our memories, I'm not keen on an idea that's crept into advertising in the past couple of years, that we should deliberately do something enjoyable in order to "make memories".

I've seen that phrase or a variant in several ads, typically for holidays. Here's one I saw on Vauxhall station in London: "Start creating tomorrow's memories today".


The picture of lion cubs suggests that a safari would be a good memory-making opportunity. The fact that there's a sale on means you are being invited to make memories on the cheap, which somehow undermines the idea. 

So as we approach the festive season, are you looking forward to "making memories"? Let's hope those family celebrations go well, partly so they will be remembered as happy occasions. And that some of that happiness is captured in photographs.

What's changed in recent years is that so many more pictures are being taken. Taking a picture can now seem less about recording an event than about confirming it's event worth recording. The posing and snapping (now silently) has almost become the equivalent of chinking glasses together to say 'we're all having a good time, aren't we?

I will try to be sparing with the pictures I take over Christmas and New Year - because I think that the fewer I have, the more likely it is that they will be around in 10 or more years from now, to act as real triggers to memory. While hundreds of almost identical pictures just create work and take up storage space, a few can be easily labelled and stored as real reminders of happy times. 

So, yes, I do hope that memories will be made over the holiday season, but not manufactured in a conscious 'photo op' way. And I hope that I'll get round to looking after them - labelling them with people's names for instance, so that in years to come when my memory has faded, or they're looked at by people who weren't there, the pictures will mean something, and not just be seen as a bunch of strangers having a good time. 

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