In 1990, a man in Boston bought a typewriter store. It was a silly time to buy a typewriter store, and he knew it. The customer base was already dwindling as the personal computer was becoming ubiquitous. But he loved repairing and refurbishing typewriters and so he bought the store and went from employee to owner.
Flash forward more than 10 years. He was probably the only typewriter store left standing in Boston, and one of only a few in the entire country. But he started to see an uptick in customers. High school and college students were popping in and looking for typewriters to inspire their poetry assignments. And thus a new customer base was born and business was booming once again.
I feel like the same is true for our photo catalogs. As a child of the 70s & 80s whose childhood and college experience was captured on cameras that you had to wind to advance the film, boxes of photos and the occasional photo album were the medium of the era to clock our best events. All hail the Polaroid camera that gave you a photo in a minute!
As photography shifted to digital media, naturally we migrated away from boxes of photos and albums we could flip through. Why print something when every photo we ever captured is right at our fingertips on our phone, external storage device, or cloud account?
But everything old is new again.
Many are realizing the value of a tangible, accessible version of their photos. I’ve never invited someone to flip through my cloud account over a cup of coffee. But I have shared my printed Facebook history with my kids and family at events or as we sit in the kitchen with friends. Why? Because it’s fun to revisit the best of our memories that we curated on social media. We’ve laughed as we reminisced, filled in the blanks that weren’t fit for social media consumption, and marveled at how much we have changed over fifteen years.
The printed version of your Facebook history does indeed revert from a modern innovation to an age-old relic- a book. But the book will long outlive the social media platform as we know it. Years from now your kids will pick it off the shelf and share it with their own children. They can flip through the book and share stories about their childhood, inspired by the photos and captions on the pages. Everything old is new again, and then old again too.