Many of us save what I call "fossils"--objects from our pasts--because we're afraid that once they go, the memories will too.
A digital camera is an elegant way to solve this problem. You can take as many images of the object as you want. You don't have to pay to print them or make room to store them. And you can use them--repeatedly and variously, if you wish--in artwork or legacy projects such as scrapbooks, albums, collages and more.
I began taking digital photos of my parents' odds and ends in the late stages of clearing out their home. The important stuff had been given to one of us kids, a friend or a charity by then. But there was a lot of unimportant stuff left that I found hard to let go of. Shirts or shoes I remembered them wearing. Miscellaneous plates, pots or pans. Cardboard boxes with my mom's handwriting on them. Lots and lots of silly bric-a-brac.
There was no way I could keep all these things, which totalled up to many, many boxes. Yet each had its own memory. Once I realized that I could honor the memory in photographs, the releasing of the actual stuff got easier. Not easy; it never got that. But easier. And in retrospect, I find that the images feel more respectful to my folks than keeping the actual things ever did. They're not stuck away in some box I never look at. They're permanently preserved. I can browse through them whenever I want. I can email them or share them. I can write about them. In other words, the photographs can be changed or used in ways that the things themselves could not.
As I began to realize this, I started taking quick digital photos any time I was decluttering something I knew needed to go but had some emotional hold on me. Projects I had decided I wasn't going to finish, furniture that served its purpose before, clothes I'd loved but no longer fit into. The images are a kind of record of the richness of the tangible mementos of my past...preserved in a way that honors not only my past but my present.
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