It's my 40th wedding anniversary. My wife Adrienne and I were still in college at SUNY-ESF in Syracuse. We married at 21 in Amenia, NY, her hometown. The reception was in the Amenia firehall, and it was a small (by today's standards) reception of less than 40 people. Forty years later, we are still married, with many more years ahead. I scanned in some 35mm slides last night and thought about the technology changes since 1978, and the fact that the same camera could do the same job today. The film was Kodak Ektachrome. Adrienne's cousin, Chris Murphy was the photographer, and I think used a Pentax SLR. The slides are still easily viewed. Imagine trying to find a digital file 40 years later. You won't. The physicality of a transparency or a negative is a quality that defines their existence, long after the event took place. The beauty of photography is that it records memories better than our brains can fix them. The sad reality that there is going to be a dearth of surviving images from 2002 onward, due to the digital avalanche. Families record things on cellphones and rarely, if ever, make prints. Phone goes dead, bye-bye-images, unless you have them backed up somewhere. The other big difference, is that at our wedding there was one photographer, not 40 wannabe photographers with cell phones. The guests were enjoying the moment, not immersed in a cell-phone (which obviously didn't yet exist).
The great thing is that the Ektachrome slides have lasted as long as our marriage, and I have hopes that at 50 years, they will still be as vibrant as our marriage.
Also happy Mother's Day to Adrienne. Our daughter Marjorie is 30 years old.
