The boxes of photo albums were in separate spots on the outside tables at the auction house. As I rounded the corner of each table, I found another album, then another, and then another.
Some of the albums had paper labels on the spine identifying a graduation, picnic or vacation, along with the years the photos were taken.
1966 – Prom and graduation
1972 – Thanksgiving dinner
1975-1981 – Christmases, including mom’s last picture
1988 – 50th class reunion
1990 – Easter and Fourth of July
Some of the cardboard boxes held framed photographs. Another contained photos still in their CVS pharmacy envelope from the year 2000 that never made it into an album.
I began wondering what will happen to my albums of family photos and vacations trips. Even now, I only take them out to create family videos. Will my family toss them out with the trash because they have no use for them? I’ll understand if they do because they have albums of their own so why keep mine.
Photo albums are an anachronism. We used them before photos could be saved to the cloud or on electronic devices. The same question may apply to those types when no one living remembers that they are in the nebulous. What will happen to them when no one cares about them anymore?
One article suggested donating them to a historical society. That works if the photos offer a window into history. But who wants hundreds of Kodak and Polaroid photos of a family’s Christmas gatherings?
Whatever you do, just make sure you discard those nude photos of yourself. At auction some years ago, a couple’s album containing their nude photos was the talk of the auction.
My older family members lived at a time after Kodak made picture-taking available to everyone. Still, they didn’t take a lot of pictures of themselves. I don’t have old scrapbooks of them from the 1940s, 1950s or even 1960s. I have a few photos of me as a child, as well as my fourth-grade school photo and high-school photos.
I don’t have any photos of my aunts and uncles from the time they were young men and women. (Maybe their families do.) I recall seeing a photo decades ago of an aunt wearing glasses with cat-eye frames from the 1950s.
They would be of value to no one but my family – just as the photos at auction. The albums didn’t attract very many bids. Two bidders went after one box, which sold for about 8 bucks. With two people going after it, I assumed that they had seen something valuable that the rest of us had missed. Another box about a foot away did not sell. The no-sells will either end up back with the owner/consignor or dumped in the trash.
Why buy other people’s photos? That’s a question a former colleague once asked me. Dealers buy them to resell on eBay, at a flea market or at another auction (depending on the historical value of the photos). Others buy them for decoration.
Some photos can offer insight into our history as a country. When I first started going to auctions, I came across 1920s photos and documents of an obviously well-to-do African American family. I wanted the photos for what they exemplified: They refuted society’s notion that all black people were poor and needy. A dealer outbid me on them because she, too, saw both the significance and monetary value of them. I was going to keep them.
Another time, I was at the Red Rooster Harlem restaurant and saw that the walls in the women’s restroom were decorated with old photos. A friend did the same with her family photos. I bought a photo of a black woman reading a book because I loved the image. She’s the face on my business cards.
One of the things I love about the antique photos that turn up at auction are the folders that hold them. These were professional sepia photographs in thick handsome folders stamped with the name of the photographer.
They were single and group photos of families – black and white, I’ve come across both – that were shot for special occasions. Folks would dress up and head down to the studio of a local photographer to pose for photos to be used as cabinet cards, which were popular until the end of the 19th century. These tend to attract multiple bidders at auction.
The photos at the most recent auction, though, held no historical value beyond the family. They were more like the ones I have in my photo albums – family events, family members and myself at various stages of my life, none of which are labeled with IDs on the back.
Here are some tips on how to preserve your family photos, and suggestions on scanning them and creating a digital photo book. Sounds like a lot of work but it has to be better than having them end up on an auction table or on the sidewalk for garbage pickup.
Do you have old photo albums hidden away some place? What will happen to them?
This is a great reminder. Digitize photographs.
One of my second cousins found a photo album of ancestors. None of people in the pictures are named and no one knows who the people are anymore. That’s sad. It’s a little piece of history lost.
Some libraries and historical societies have history days where you can take in old photos and they will scan them and digitize them in their files. That helps with naming family members and saving their photos.