What's in a picture?



It frustrates my mother to no end that Fotomat doesn't exist anymore. Remember those little huts you would drive up to and pick up the developed pictures taken with your trusty Instamatic? 

Now we take photos with our phones, but the result is we often don't see them displayed the way we used to. For someone without a computer or smart phone, it can be a  little frustrating. "I  never get to see anybody's pictures," Mom will say. So you put the phone in front of her, but to view a series of photos is tricky for the uninitiated. Looking at them herself and trying to have a light touch as she scrolls, she will inevitable cry out, "I lost it. Where did it go?"

My mother has plenty of photo albums, but the days are gone when you took photos and slipped them into the plastic sleeves of a memory book or laid them on sticky pages with a piece of plastic on top. (Ever try to retrieve one of those stuck photos after a number of years? It's like trying to peel off wallpaper with a sledgehammer.) So every once in a while, it's just easier to go through those old albums and shoot photos of photos with a smart phone. And message them to your friends and family, so they can recoil at their younger selves and ask you, "Where the hell did you find that?"

At Fotomat, of course. You didn't ask me when.




    

   




 



   

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