Try to remember
For several years, I have been crafting digital collages as a way
to curate my photographs and document events in my everyday life.
A Postcard from Today
It began like this. In August of 2016, I talked some girlfriends into joining me in a creative challenge: every day for six weeks we would each make a page to document some aspect of our day. The pages could be analog or digital. Text was allowed, but the pages were to be primarily visual.
When the six weeks were up, the five of us got together to share our creations. I was fascinated to see how differently people had approached this task, one mainly taking pictures of flowers, another organizing all her pages around a central theme. My approach was to take photographs each day and then combine them into a collage, adding text as necessary to provide context or prompt memory. Each collage was like a page in a digital scrapbook, intended to bring vividly to mind the event it depicted.
I so enjoyed making my pages that when the challenge was over I decided to continue the practice, calling the project “A Postcard from Today.” And for a couple of months, I did in fact create a postcard every day. Here’s a sampling of those early postcards:
Before long, however, I found it too hard to keep up this rhythm. And, frankly, some days were not all that interesting! So I began creating postcards only when the spirit or events — or photographs — moved me. Occasionally, I also incorporated photos I’d found online or even made a postcard with text alone. By the end of November 2016 I had created ninety postcards, but my pace was definitely slowing.
Number our days
One challenge was that sometimes my pictures weren’t compelling enough to make into a postcard, even though they evoked an experience I wanted to remember — or there weren’t enough of them to make a good postcard. There were even experiences with no photos at all (almost unthinkable in the age of the selfie!). So in December of 2016 I came up with the idea of making a visual calendar that would provide an overview of an entire month. I created a simple grid template which I could fill with pictures and text. Here’s the first one:
Because the individual calendar images were fairly small, they didn’t have to be particularly compelling. A snapshot sufficed. And when I did have more and better photographs, I made a postcard.Since that December epiphany, I have made a visual calendar every month (with the notable exception of 2019, when so many life changes were taking place that documenting them was not a priority!). The calendars serve as a chronicle of major events and minor occurrences, projects I’m working on, books and movies I’m enjoying, how the Warriors are doing, what is going on in the world and how I feel about it. They also give me a sense of broader patterns and trends in my life. How often did I mention wanting to quit my job before I actually took the leap? How did we respond to the many challenges of the COVID years? How did my work progress over two semesters of online drawing classes? These visual calendars help me remember.
Here’s an example from 2020:
And these are all my calendars from 2022 (see the link under “Connections,” below, for the full-size images):Ways and means
I made my first postcards with a simple screen-capture and markup app called Skitch but soon found that I needed a more powerful tool in order to make images that were satisfying to me. So I turned to Photoshop. There I created a template to standardize the dimensions of the postcards and, when I started creating calendars, developed the basic structures of those pages: grid, dates, comments box, and other standard elements.
As I grew more proficient with Photoshop, my calendars became more elaborate and less constrained by the grid. I experimented with Illustrator and sometimes added vector graphics to my collages — along with photos, drawings, text elements, and so on. I hadn’t planned on a deep dive into Photoshop and Illustrator, but I have loved working with these tools. The postcards and calendars have given me a place to experiment and explore and, though I still have lots to learn (does one ever get to the bottom of these complex applications?), it’s satisfying to see the progress I’ve made over the past several years.
The days are long but the years are (increasingly) short
In one of my favorite articles from graduate school days, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (BKG to her friends) describes the way certain material objects facilitate the process of “life review.” While life review is associated primarily with the elderly, remembrance of things past can be meaningful at any age. BKG describes several kinds of objects of memory, from “material companions” to “mementos and souvenirs” to various kinds of synthetic memory objects: things created specifically as reminders of past times. Although BKG was writing of material objects, the virtual objects that are my postcards and calendars clearly fit her category of synthetic memory objects.
Specifically, these forms are what she calls “ensembles,” where elements that have sentimental value but are not “displayable” in their own right take on new meaning as part of an assemblage of like items. Classic examples are memory quilts made from bits of old clothes, notebooks of collected and annotated recipes, as well as photograph albums and scrapbooks. Though I detest the scrapbooking (ugh) industry with its twee stickers and other cutesy, ready-made elements, I have to admit that my postcards and calendars could be regarded as a sort of virtual scrapbook. Whatever the medium, we scrapbook creators share the intention to remember and narrate significant moments in our lives through the selection and arrangement of meaningful tidbits — photographs, souvenirs, poems, recipes, quotations, and more.
I have always had trouble remembering the details of what happened to me more than, say, six months ago (or six weeks or six days!). When and where did I/we do what and with whom? Too often I just don’t know. To help solve these riddles, I have begun systematically adding captions to my calendar images, as well as to my postcards, to reinforce whatever it is I want to remember. These creations serve as a sort of memory bank of the events and trends of my life, fostering reminiscence and rumination — “autobiographical archaeology,” as BKG calls it.
Let me count the ways
Something I love about this project is the way it connects me with other people. Postcards, in particular, are a fun way to share photos and memories with friends and family. Now, when someone wants to see my pictures, they don’t have to sift through dozens of boring shots just to find the few gems: the best ones are all there in the postcards. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was to give me a reliable place to post these images. (Yeah, I know, but I don’t much like Facebook.)
One of the real joys of the project has been sharing it with Craig, who takes a keen interest in what I create, offers me great feedback, and is always encouraging. Of course, a lot of what the postcards document are things we did together, so he has a vested interest! But I’m always touched when he wants to use a postcard to tell family and friends about our adventures. I also appreciate the ways this project encourages me in mindfulness and gratitude. I started making postcards to help me pay more attention to what’s happening in my everyday life and to encourage me to live in the present. Now, I add to my visual calendar almost every day, and taking a moment to snap a picture or write a caption means that I pause, even briefly, to absorb whatever is prompting that entry. And, of course, noticing something good is the first step toward gratitude. Postcards have also proved a great way to organize travel photos and have inspired me to try to catalog my zillions of pictures from our trips — not that I’ve always followed through on this admirable intention! Sometimes I’ve fooled around with Illustrator to create imagery for a postcard. And from time to time, I have made one based on words that inspired me or using old photographs or other found materials. I hope to make more of what I think of as “postcards from the past,” as I slowly sort through boxes of family pictures or plumb my own uncatalogued photographs. I wish I had started making postcards in my teens, but… here we are. And someday I hope to turn all these virtual scrapbook pages into material reality — i.e., photo books. Still so much to do!Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
(Psalm 90:12)As we grow old, that twilight
Would illuminate treasure
in the fields of memory.
(John O’Donohue)Connections
- “A Postcard from Today” was originally inspired by my friend Aaron’s message-in-a-bottle journal, which he kept going for more than a decade and may maintain still, for all I know. I hope one day to interview him about this project.
- See all my Visual Calendars and Postcards.
- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review, in Elliott Oring, ed., Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, A Reader, Utah State University Press, 1989, pp. 329-338.
- Want to make your own postcards? Ubiquitous cell-phone cameras have turned us all into documentary photographers, and photo-editing software with ready-made templates makes it easy for anyone to make collages from their photos. ChatGPT (!) suggests these apps:
- Adobe Photoshop Elements: This is a powerful photo editing and scrapbooking software that allows users to create digital layouts, edit photos, and add text and embellishments.
- Corel PaintShop Pro: This software offers a wide range of tools for editing photos and creating digital scrapbook pages, including brushes, stamps, and text effects.
- Scrapbook MAX: This digital scrapbooking software offers a wide range of templates, embellishments, and other design elements to help users create unique and personalized scrapbook pages.
- My Memories Suite: This software is easy to use, it offers a variety of templates, clipart and embellishments. It’s a great option for those who are new to digital scrapbooking
- GIMP: This is a free and open-source photo editing and digital scrapbooking software that offers a wide range of tools for editing photos and creating digital scrapbook pages.
- John O’Donohue: To Bless the Space Between Us — A Book of Blessings (Doubleday, 2008)
1 thought on “Try to remember”
Hello Jenny. Such an interesting idea and one I think I could adapt for my Blog. (Once I have mastered the HOW of it all.) Thank you for the inspiration. Liz
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