I have more photographs today than I have ever owned in my life, and I look at almost none of them.
That sentence would have made no sense to me forty years ago. I once built a room for photographs — a real room, with track lighting installed in the ceiling and cork board covering the walls, where more than fifty black-and-white prints hung in rotation, changed out as new work came in. I’d take one down, print another in the darkroom, and hang it that same week, so the room was never finished. It was always becoming something. Friends who visited our house didn’t ask to see my pictures. They walked into the family room and were already looking at them, and more than once someone stood in front of a print for a full minute before they said a word, the way people do in a gallery rather than a living room.
That room existed because of another one. I got into photography before I was married, borrowing 35mm cameras from a friend who owned several — my first real experience with a telephoto lens was on one of his, at a sports car rally with hills and crowds and more happening than I knew how to frame. I was hooked immediately. A few years later, when my daughter turned one, I used her birthday as an excuse to finally buy my own camera, and I joked for years afterward that it was really her present.
Not long after that I built a black-and-white darkroom in our house — a professional enlarger, trays of chemistry lined up in the dark, the particular smell of stop bath that I can still call up if I try. There is a kind of patience that darkroom work teaches you that nothing digital replicates: you don’t know what you have until the print begins to rise up out of the developer, faint at first, and you either caught the moment or you didn’t. I filled twelve leather-bound albums that way, fifty pages each, eight images to a page, all of them stored properly in a closet. But it was the wall people remembered. Nobody asks to see a shoebox. Everybody notices a gallery.
The darkroom stayed behind when we sold that house after thirteen years there — the enlarger, the trays, all of it. What I have instead now is a textbook case of digital photo overload: a phone with several thousand images on it, backed up somewhere I couldn’t precisely describe, more securely preserved than any album I ever owned and searchable by date or face or location in a way nothing in that closet ever was. And I almost never see them, unless I go looking.
That’s the part that has been sitting with me. Not a complaint about technology — I use it every day, and The Encore Project itself would not exist without it. Something quieter. A question about the difference between owning a memory and encountering one.
For most of human history, the objects that held our memories lived among us. The road atlas rode in the glove compartment. The letters went into a desk drawer that occasionally announced itself when you were looking for something else. The newspaper landed on the porch every morning and spread itself across the kitchen table, uninvited, whether or not you’d asked for it that day. These things found us. We didn’t have to remember to remember.
These things found us. We didn’t have to remember to remember.
I understand now why my wall worked the way it did. A recent real-world study on context-dependent memory found that the places where we spend time — not just the objects themselves — become bound up with what we recall, and that this effect grows stronger the less familiar or frequent that place is. A photo album functioned as a kind of map for exactly this reason: a family didn’t just recall an image, they recalled where it lived — the wedding pictures in the blue album on the second shelf, the baby photos in the heavy red one that took both hands to lift. Finding a memory was a small physical hunt, and the hunting itself was part of the remembering.
Digital memory doesn’t work that way. It waits. Recent reporting on what researchers now call digital photo overload has found that the sheer volume of images we now capture — with no cost, no limit, no development — is quietly complicating our ability to form clear memories at all, since a photo that’s never revisited never gets the chance to become a memory cue. There is no equivalent of walking into a room and being met. And because storage is nearly infinite, there’s no longer any pressure to choose. I never had to decide which twelve photographs deserved a wall; the room itself forced a kind of editing that no phone ever asks of me. Now I just keep everything, which somehow means I engage with almost none of it.
I felt a smaller version of this with the newspaper. I started delivering papers at twelve years old, which is where I first got interested in journalism — reading the news I was paid to throw onto porches. Tulsa had two dailies then, and I kept up the habit long after the paper route ended, subscribing to both papers until the Tulsa Tribune folded in 1992, and then to the one that remained, every morning, for decades. I only gave it up a few years ago. I missed it more than I expected to — the physical unfolding of it, the ink, the fact that it arrived whether I asked for it or not. I’ve made my peace with reading it on a screen now. But I noticed the difference, and I think the noticing matters.
I don’t think this makes digital memory worse. That’s not the conclusion I want to reach, and it isn’t an honest one. Adults in their eighties and nineties who actively use technology to stay connected report less loneliness and greater life satisfaction than those who don’t — proof that digital doesn’t have to mean absent. It simply hasn’t been built, in my own life, to find me the way my wall used to.
My wife Bonnie seems to understand this instinctively in a way I didn’t. She keeps small altars around our house — one in her walk-in closet — decorated with photographs and drawings she’s collected from trips and ordinary days, rearranged and refreshed over time. She’s also far more likely than I am to post an old photograph online, resurfacing it deliberately for no occasion at all. I used to think that made her the sentimental one. I think now it makes her the one who kept doing, in miniature, what I used to do at scale.
Here’s what I left out of the story until now, because I only recently understood why it mattered: the gallery didn’t entirely die. A smaller version of it, quieter and more private, has been with me for decades since — a few of the photographs on my current walls go all the way back to a house we left in 1987. They live now in my home office, a converted room I’ve written about before, on the wall behind my desk. Almost nobody sees it. Only a handful of close friends ever have. But the ones who do want to look at every frame, and they always ask for the story behind it. And I never tire of it myself. It’s not a shoebox in a drawer, waiting to be searched.
It’s still there every day, still finding me the way the family room once found fifty guests at a time — just narrower now, and quieter, and mine.
I don’t think this is really a story about what I lost. I built an entire room once so that memory would ambush anyone who walked through the door, and when that room was gone, I built a smaller one instead, without ever quite deciding to. I still have every photograph I ever took. Most of them I have to go looking for. A few of them, without my really planning it, never let me stop running into them at all. That’s not something digital photo overload can take from me. I just have to keep choosing it, the way I apparently always have.
