30/07/2026
The photograph below was taken by my dad in around 1967. Steve is my eldest brother, captured here sledging on a recreation ground near our childhood home in Sutton Coldfield. Dad was a very keen photographer and had his own home darkroom - I remember being allowed in there once when I was about 4 or 5, being told to stand there and don't move while I watched him exposing and developing prints. It seemed like magic to me.
Photographs are everywhere around us all the time, but many of us don't print them. They languish on phones and hard drives, passing across our screens briefly on social media channels, popping up as a memory a few years later, but mainly out of sight out of mind.
This image was captured on slide film so it has languished in a box for 6 decades, it's probably been viewed through a slide projector once or twice, projected onto a white wall in the lounge at our family home.
Several years ago, I invested in getting all Dad's slides and my own scanned by a professional. Dad's total around 1300, mine a mere 300 from my early 20s. I had big plans to curate them and create photo books, gifting them to my brothers. But they have languished in their boxes, and the scanned files have languished on my hard drive! I now know that ADHD plays a huge part in making starting projects very challenging - late diagnosed at 57 years old a few years ago, which explains a lot!
My brother turned 71 yesterday - we're lucky he is still with us, being a cancer survivor and not in the best of health. And there are hundreds of slides I need his input on - family holidays featuring landmarks, but before I was born and before I was old enough to be paying attention.
How would you approach this project, breaking it down into manageable stages for my weirdly wired ADHD menopausal brain to have a fighting chance of moving it forward? The scanned files are in folders by Box Number with around 36 per box - 36 exposures on a film - corresponding the number of the box the slides are in, which I have kept.
