Every January I spend a weekend in front of the computer designing a photo album of the previous year.
It takes ages. I
typically snap around 2,000 images each year, mostly on my iPhone, and these
have to be merged with Clara’s, filtered, uploaded to a website then
painstakingly annotated and arranged into a photobook of up to 150 pages.
The end result is well
worth the effort. In an era of digital photography, we rarely look back at
photos from several years ago, but when the highlights are professionally bound
and sit invitingly on the bookshelf, we do actually get them out and enjoy the
happy memories. There’s something about sitting on the sofa, with the weight of
a hardback album in your hands, looking at sharp images on glossy paper, that
makes the reminiscence more palpable than glancing at a screen.
The 2018 album I am
putting together this weekend has highlights of trips to Seville, Barbados,
Cornwall, Canada, Madrid and Budapest. These along with a smattering of
pictures of the cat and odds and ends like a dramatic October sunset snapped on
the way home from work. It’s remarkable how much we see and do in a year
without trying too hard.
But nowhere in my
album will you find any reference to my Parkinson’s.
Why is this?
Why in my photo album
do I present a rose-tinted view of my life, without any allusion to the
elephant in the room?
It’s a common enough trait.
On social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, most people tend to show off
only the good aspects of their lives and gloss over the bad and the merely
humdrum. Happy, smiling, perfect families. Beautiful bodies and faces. Exotic
excursions. Healthy activities. Doing good things for the planet and society.
Sunny, blue sky days.
My photo album is no
different: the images that make the cut are all the ones that show people and
places at their most, er, photogenic.
Am I in denial? Am I
trying to portray life as something better than it really is? Am I living in a
fantasy world, pretending everything is wonderful when truth is unpalatable? In
a competitive world, am I trying to deceive myself or others that I have made
it in life and that I am living the dream in spite of my condition?
I’ve no doubt this is
the case for some people.
For myself, I simply
take the view that it’s better to focus on the good things in life. When I sit
on the sofa flicking through the photo album, I want to revel in the nostalgia,
not be reminded of what I have to live with every day. The stiffness in my hand
as I turn the pages tells me all I need to know about that.
And so, here are three
pictures that made the cut in the 2018 album, all taken with an iPhone: a sunrise over the
North Sea, a sunset over South London and another sunset, seen from the
air shortly after taking off from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport…