in the house where annie and i grew up, there are shelves and shelves of photo albums. probably around fifty fat three ring binders filled with all of our mother's snapshots, carefully arranged and categorized with names like, 'good times 1992-1994,' or 'assemblies, baptisms and funerals.' i guess that's one of the b… Read more

in the house where annie and i grew up, there are shelves and shelves of photo albums. probably around fifty fat three ring binders filled with all of our mother's snapshots, carefully arranged and categorized with names like, 'good times 1992-1994,' or 'assemblies, baptisms and funerals.' i guess that's one of the biggest things we both inherited from her: camera always at hand, constantly trying to capture the things she loved in photographic emulsion. and i guess flickr is our version of those shelves, packed full of photographs just waiting to be flipped through, the memories reminisced over a cup of coffee around our big kitchen table, good times, funerals, baby pictures and all. annie shoots a kind of active nostalgia, taking pictures that already look like they're sitting on those yellowed pages, and she's damn good at it because she knows from experience exactly what she's looking for. there's a friendly, unspoken competition between us to see who can get the picture that best belongs in the kind of photo albums our mom would keep. a couple things i've noticed, 1. when she gets drunk she fires off shots with abandon (a good thing). 2. she can't close one eye without the other following, so she always has to cover it up with her hand instead. one day i'll get her a camera with a 1:1 viewfinder and fix that problem for good. 3. somehow she's got the idea that shooting on film is "cool," or "the right way to do things." god help me if i'm responsible for that one. but she's my sister and i'll keep developing it for her until she decides she's ready to learn how to do it herself.