“Curation” is a word often reserved for museums and art collections, right? It feels stuffy, maybe even pretentious.
It also plays an unexpectedly important role in your life.
We see curation in so many aspects of our lives, but most people have become aware of it because of social media. Curation is the process of assembling, managing and presenting a collection. Facebook contains carefully- (often over-) curated details about our lives. Instagram feeds are often tightly curated to present a consistent image, style or pattern, to the point where we now see plenty of articles pointing out the realities behind the images featured throughout the app.
Everything we keep in our home is part of a curated collection of items. It might not seem like your random collection of Ninja Turtles is part of your curated set of possessions, and yet they most definitely are. You’ve made the choice to manage them instead of selling them or throwing them away.
When we die, someone is going to have to sort through alllllll the things that we’ve kept. They will sift through it, figuring out what kind of meaning each item held in our life, and form (or reform) their own picture of us based on what they see.
One of the most magical concepts to me is the process of discovery that takes place when we sort through someone’s belongings. I’m not talking about being nosy and rifling through a medicine cabinet when you think no one’s looking. I’m talking about taking the time to sit with individual items while you unpack and repack boxes of belongings, maybe in the attic at your grandmother’s house or in your parents’ basement. These are the places we tend to keep things that we aren’t using but can’t bear to throw away. It’s where some of the best discoveries take place.
Somewhere in amongst the boxes and piles, there will – hopefully – be photographs. If you’re like my parents, your family photographs might be neatly collated in albums arranged chronologically by year and others displayed in wall frames. Some collections might include a treasure trove of shoe boxes filled with random collections of snapshots and formal portraits. If you’re like me, your collection of family photos will be a mishmash of the two.
Those photographs are the whole reason behind me becoming a photographer. Not because they’re pretty (although they often are) or will make you smile for years (although they often will), but because those photos and those albums are going to be even more meaningful in 50 years’ time. One day, someone is going to sift through those photos of yours and start piecing together your story. In those collections, your great-grandchildren (or great-nieces and -nephews, if you’re like me) will find you. They’ll see what images you’ve chosen to keep; what albums you assembled. It doesn’t matter whether you cycle your wall art through your frames and store the old copies in a large folder or wrap the canvases in cloth or bubble wrap; whether you keep photographs in albums or just stored in boxes. What matters is that they exist in a physical form. In your collection, they’ll catch glimpses of your personality at different stages of your life. see who mattered to you, and discover what activities were so interesting to you that you wanted to keep photographic evidence of them.
Think about that for a second: it’s your photographs that are going to tell family you haven’t even met yet the story of who you once were.
In my work, I’m responsible for curating collections of photographs to send to my clients. An improperly curated collection – one that contains loosely selected or repetitive images – can cause meaning and impact to get lost or clients to be faced with the impossibly daunting task of sorting through the pile. I see it as my job to curate my galleries as tightly as possible, so that my clients can quickly get to the heart of what my time with them was all about, whether that’s a backyard wedding, fall portrait session, or at-home documentary session. The fact that I deal with printed photographs also means that I’m helping my clients in their own curation process, as they choose what memories are most important to them and how they want to present those memories, whether that’s through wall art, albums or collections of smaller prints.
My own collection (a small fraction of which is shown above) involves wall art, small prints, computer print outs, albums of 4x6s and modern digitally-printed albums. There are formal portraits, creative portraits, snapshots and out-of-focus shots. It’s not all pretty, but it all means something. It’s a hodge-podge of mismatched everything and it’s mostly stored within one large bookshelf, but photographs live all over our home. Wedding photos live on our bedroom walls. Our living room walls are filled with artwork comprised of landscape photographs made by me or artwork collected while traveling. Both of these collections highlight specific details about events that we chose to chronicle. My shelved collection of photographs and those hallway wall collages are where personality is revealed. They show me as a person who values silliness, mischief, laughter, family, loyalty and close friendships. They show that I value plane tickets and experiences more than physical objects. They also show that I had a penchant for nudity in my younger years… ;)
Someday, my niece and nephews are probably going to have to sort through my collection. By then, I figure they’ll know that Rich and I had a fierce love for each of them, as well as a passion for travel, but they’ll see just how deep both of those went when they open those boxes. I hope they’ll get their own magical experience within the process of discovery.
In order to curate that collection of photographic memories, you need to have a collection to begin with, so that someone – one day – will discover details about what you valued most. I’m always happy to recommend consumer print labs, whether you’re a client or not, so that you can start printing your photos. If you’re a client or thinking about becoming a client, let’s talk about what kind of collection you want in your life. Books? Wall art? Loose prints? Let’s make it happen.
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I’m Ang. I’m a Cornwall-Ontario based documentary family and wedding photographer with a passion for curating family photos and creating prints. If you found this topic interesting and want to see the impact that a specific curation project had on me, I’d encourage you to check out this post about my dad from a couple of years ago. Searching for a family photographer? Have a little look around Moment.us Photography‘s site to see if I might be the right Cornwall photographer for you.
