In which I abbreviate my photographic life…
The 15 Photos Challenge launched when I decided to clear out my storage unit and commit to abbreviating my life. Not to shorten my life, as it were, but to trim the fat out of it. The decision to make this bold move was partly a cost-cutting measure. Call me Captain Obvious, but I’ll just make the point that it’s a good thing storage units aren’t free.
Now, I’m not a cost-cutter by nature. My small storage unit housed sentimental stuff and I knew when I rented it that I was about to piss away a bunch of money simply because I couldn’t part with the past. Sure, I used the unit to store my skis, snow tires, and other functional stuff. I justified it that way. But the real story behind the extravagance was the stories held in the ephemera of six decades. The journals. My son’s childhood artwork. The detritus of passion projects long since abandoned. And the piece de la resistance, my bulky collection of precious photo albums.
At first I had no idea what to do about the crates of big and small albums filled with photos primarily capturing my son’s childhood, 1986-2006. My mother had given me a 35 mm camera when my son was born and I finally abandoned it when she gave me a digital camera two decades later. I had kept nearly every photo ever taken, sometimes with duplicates. I had thrown out anything blatantly worthless, such as the blank photos or the photos taken by mistake. But I had kept plenty of photos that were poorly lit, poorly staged, blurry, repetitive, pointless, and otherwise unworthy of saving. I was a photo hoarder, if I may use that term. No shade on anyone with a serious hoarding habit.
But I was ready to reform my ways. I wanted a streamlined bundle of evidence that I had raised a child and fooled around with a 35 mm camera in between diaper changes, sports practices, homework help, and endless laundry. The number 15 came to me as though channeled from some numerologist who dabbled in poetry. The number fifteen in word form shares a phoneme with the word “photo” and that was enough for me. I decided to select 15 photos for every year of my child’s life.
Let me just admit from the start that I did not hold to this unit of time through the entire project. Plenty of years turned out to have too many good photos to be limited to 15, so I shortened the unit of time to a half year in several instances. I did this so that I wouldn’t get stuck. This was a lengthy project and it would have been easy to abandon it if the going got too rough. I wanted to enjoy myself as I sorted through the albums. For this reason, I broke some rules. But they were my own damn rules. Making allowances for my hopeless sentimentality allowed me to bypass the sense of “stuckness” I occasionally wrestled with.
I stayed true to the number 15 though. Here’s how it dictated my work flow. I counted out 15 post-it notes and opened an album. Side note: I did not start at the beginning. I started at the end. Specifically, I started with an album from a trip to Asia. It was more than a trip, actually, as I lived there for two years. This was 2004-2006. My workflow was to put a post-it on the photos that were most iconic of the trip. The ones that stand out as avatars for a period in my life when I was exploring the world. I’d leave the project aside and return to it with a few adjustments until I felt comfortable with my choices. I then took the photos out of the album and scanned them on my Epson to my phone and then to my laptop. I created a folder there to hold them. I put the actual photographs in a manila folder and filed it in a plastic crate with pendaflex hanging files in the Old School fashion.
Now the moment of truth had arrived. Perhaps there are two kinds of people in this world. One kind would have no problem disposing of the remaining photos in the album. The other kind of person feels physically ill at the prospect. You can no doubt guess what kind of a person I am. Let me just assure you that I did not throw out any photos of my son. That would have been a bridge too far. My son had visited me during his college break. He had stayed with me where I lived in Cambodia and had accompanied me to Vietnam . I kept every photo of him. But I dumped the rest of that album into a trash can in its entirety. Like a boss. I was a new woman.
The years in Asia with all the side trips within the continent had been captured mostly in photos of curiosities and landscapes, but there were also photos of people I’d worked with and people I’d met along the way. There were lots of photos of a dog named Tiger who traveled with me. I saved 15 photos from the first album and abandoned the rest. They are just gone now. And that’s fine. In fact, that’s good. But I’m not going to tell you it was easy.
I began this project of emptying old photo albums in the summer of 2025. From the start, something I’ll call “nostalgia sickness” would strike often. When it did, I would dip into the cold swimming pool to ease the discomfort. If that didn’t break the spell, a trip to Dunkin for iced coffee with cold foam was in order. Decluttering is not for the faint of heart, my friend.
Another trick I used to power through the time-traveling experience was to lift a barbell loaded with enough weight to make me groan a little. This worked as a distraction, much like the cold water or cold coffee would. The next day, I’d be back at it. There were a few times I cried when looking at pictures or putting them in the trash. At least once it was an ugly cry.
Rest assured that it got easier. It took a month or two to get to the point where I could scan photos without being sick with nostalgia. “Don’t give up” is what I’m saying, I guess.
Next time, I’ll tell you about my work flow and how it evolved into something I could thoroughly enjoy. You, too, can do this!
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