I’m baffled, and a little horrified, to report that the Photos app on my phone today contains 65,835 items. To study each one for even just one second would take more than eighteen hours, and that’s never going to happen.
Occasionally I like to print a selection of pictures, because to print is to make a choice, a commitment. It takes more effort, and (therefore) feels more valuable. Better still if I can build some kind of story around them.
It is also possible, I realise, to have too many prints. Unsorted, these too can feel overwhelming. One of the first participants on my Micro-Memoir course said she couldn’t face going into the garage to sort through them all and scan the most important ones.
I suggested she might avoid scanning by simply photographing a selection using her phone, and use those to build the micro-memoir she wanted to write about her late sister.
She did that, and I helped her put the selected pictures into a physical book, with plenty of blank space to fill with words too. Charmian was kind enough to let me share with you an overview of this raw, illustrated micro-memoir – words still to come.
If you click the link, you’ll see:
- Forty pages in total.
- Just over half of them given to pictures.
- Images run in broadly chronological sequence.
- Some singles, some split to run across two pages.
- Plenty of blank pages to write in.
In its raw state, the front cover used one of Charmian’s photos-of-photos to give a sense of what’s inside, and left plenty of space to add any text.
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👉 The next Micro-Memoir course starts on Monday 3 August
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