“Your everlasting summer you can see it fading fast
So you grab a piece of something that you think is gonna last
Well you wouldn’t even know a diamond if you held it in your hand
The things you think are precious I can’t understand”
– Steely Dan, 1972
There was a time when photography was less about capturing a moment and more about surviving the process. The good ol’ days when seat belts were optional, asbestos was practically a food group, and snapping a photo required patience, coordination, and the nerve of a bomb technician. You didn’t just take a photo. You committed to it. One click, one chance, and the inevitable two-week delay before discovering you’d immortalized Aunt Linda mid-sneeze.
Then behold, the Kodak Instamatic era, a magical time when “point and shoot” often became “point, shoot, pray, and wait a fortnight.” This sturdy rectangle with the ergonomics of a brick, didn’t just take pictures. It told stories. Mostly tragic ones. A finger over the lens. Half a face. A mysterious thumb that would go unidentified for generations. These weren’t photographs. They were emotional puzzles you had to reconstruct with family members like forensic analysts reconstructing the Last Supper. And yet, we loved it.
Why? Because these photos weren’t just snapshots. They were tangible time capsules. Glossy 3x5s that curled at the edges like old lettuce and smelled faintly of chemistry and disappointment. We slid them reverently into sticky-paged albums or chucked them into shoeboxes, where they marinated under the bed in several pounds of lint.
But time, like your Aunt Judy’s perm, is cruel and relentless. Those photos? They faded. They yellowed. They warped. And in the cruelest twist of all, they shrank in memory while we grew in nostalgia. What once seemed vibrant now looks like it was shot through a foggy window in Mordor. Children became blurs. Landscapes turned jaundiced. That beautiful prom shot? Now a sepia-toned warning about polyester.
So, I recently did what any self-deprecating, digital archaeologist with an overactive imagination would do: I turned to AI, where the past gets a digital makeover, and becomes the intern we never knew we needed, but can’t trust with the family album. Not because I had to. But, because I could.
And here’s the thing: memory was never really accurate in the first place. That’s part of its charm. It smooths wrinkles, adds sunsets where there weren’t any, and conveniently forgets that the family dog peed on the birthday cake. So when AI decides to give Cousin Ricky a mustache he never had or redecorates your living room to look like Hannibal Lecter’s prison cell, who’s to say that isn’t exactly how it happened?
Is it real? No. Is it better than real? Sometimes, absolutely.
So pull out those shoeboxes. Dust off those faded albums. Give the past a fresh coat of pixels, while I share with you some of my own fading snapshots of the gang during the early 1970s that I recently revamped with Sora. I let it add the occasional parasol, extra flower, or random unicorn photobomb. Because history may be written by the victors, but memory? Memory is now illustrated by robots who think Grandma needs more sequins. And honestly… they’re not always wrong.
The End(s)
