Days of Future Past

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging around in my freezer when it became painfully clear that I needed to free up some space.

The time had come when those two, half-used bags of Trader Joe's
chicken breasts covered with freezer burn needed to go. Oh, and the
four bags of equally freezer-burned edamame, two containers of chili
leftover from last Christmas and ... alright, all those yellow boxes.

I've acutally been storing these yellow boxes in at least 3-4
different freezers for years. Some of them from as far back as 1994.
How many people can say they have stuff in their freezer from 1994?

It occurred to me, finally, that I was never going to open up those
yellow boxes and consume the contents of them. Or the two cans that
were stacked in there with them. So I took all those yellow boxes out
of the freezer, along with the two cans that were stacked in there with
them, piled it all up on my workbench out in the garage.

After removing the two bags of frozen chicken breasts, four bags of
edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and all
those yellow boxes from my freezer, I found I had lots more room in
there to store some other items which used to fall out on the floor
whenever I opened the freezer door.

OK, now take a look at the above photograph and raise your hands if you know what it is.

Hmmm, a bunch of boxes with the word Kodak on them. Must be some
kind of camera thing. Maybe it's flash memory or a type of optical
storage disk.

Nope.

If you raised your hand and answered, "film," you get a gold star either for being smart or for being old. 

For those of you who didn't answer film, if you're over 20, you need to take some classes.

Film is a kind of cultural artifact from an era (oh, about 5 years
ago) long since passed. The word "film" is sometimes used to describe
an artform that is considered an important way to inform, educate,
entertain and indoctrinate the societies that make them. This is also
known as moviemaking or just movies.

For our purposes we'll refer to film by it's truest and more
technical definition, that of an ancient medium by which images were
recorded on thin, flexible sheets of plastic or other material coated
with a gooey, light-sensitive emulsion, using cameras through a process
called photography.

Photography [fəˈtägrəfē] Noun. The art or practice of taking and processing photographs.

The process of taking photographs didn't always precipitate the
instant gratification we've grown accustomed to. Long ago, it entailed
expending cash and fossil fuel to purchase film packaged in little
yellow boxes usually made by a company based in Rochester, N.Y. After
recording your photographs you had to expend more fossil fuel to
transport your film to a "photo lab." Up to a week later you then used
more fossil fuel to return to the photo lab, paid more cash to the
clerk, a good amount of which went to a company in based in Rochester,
N.Y., and your processed film was returned to you along with an
envelope usually stuffed with 12, 24 or 36 photographic prints.

Tragically, only about 3% of these photographic prints brought any
satisfaction at all. The rest exhibited blobs of orange or black or
white usually with some ghostly silhouette of human figures you could
almost recognize, proving that photography was not exactly
unchallenging. 

Just a few minutes after I took the above mentioned photograph I was
walking through the aisles at my local Albertson's store in search of a
bag of charcoal briquets which I would use later that night to grill
fresh(er), not freezer-burned, chicken breasts.

On the way to the check-out counter with a 25-pound bag of Kingsford
on my shoulder, I heard an announcement over the in-house public
address system that said if you were a shopper at Albertson's and you
brought your digital photos to the digital photo center located within
the store, you could go home with those digital photos stored on an
optical storage disk commonly referred to as a CD. This announcement
came right between REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling
Anymore" and the Eurythmics' "Here Comes the Rain Again."

What is the point of all this?

Maybe I'm grieving over the gradual and torturous death of a beautiful artform.

For many years I used to consume large amounts of film, most of
which came packaged inside little yellow boxes like the ones in the
photo above. On an average day, I probably made 200-300 exposures on
film.

Now, I might make 200-300 digital captures of little yellow boxes of film so that I have one for a blog post.

Ever since I piled all those yellow boxes on my workbench over two
weeks ago, I've been looking at them and trying to decide what I'm
going to do with them. I decided, that I just can not toss them into
the dumpster. That would lead to their being buried in a landfill
somewhere in Los Angeles County. I couldn't bear that so, I took a
photograph of them.

Now I'll probably stuff all of them into a box and continue to store them for many more years to come.

Just not in my freezer.