My father is a prolific photographer…always has been. As a child, I remember the closet shelves in his study that were filled with shoeboxes of photos and slides. Many of his best photos graced the walls of our house (and some hang on my walls now).
After his retirement, he decided to tackle the herculean task of digitizing the literally thousands of images that were filling boxes, drawers, and shelves. And as he’s worked through those images, he’s assembled some of the best into a series of photo books. He prints the pages of the books on a color printer, spiral binds them, and sends copies to me and my sister.
One of the books is called “Sisters,” and has photos of me and my sister from infancy through today. Another, “Pals,” has pictures of all of us with friends throughout the years. Some are less personal—“Animals,” “Signs,” “Travel,” etc.
My favorite, though, is the first one he compiled. “The Early Years” is an autobiographical photo essay that begins with some extraordinary images of my grandparents and great-grandparents in Germany in the early 1900s, follows my father’s childhood growing up in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, explores his experiences as a “half-Jew” in Germany during WWII, and ends with his emigration to and first years in California with his parents before he met my mother.
I want to share these photos and the story they tell, and he’s given me permission to do so. The question is how. The way he presented them, with groups of related images on each page, works well from a narrative standpoint—which makes Flickr a little less ideal. I wish there were a way to take a group of photos in Flickr and create a single blog entry from them—that would probably be the ideal approach. The blog entry could aggregate the related photos and allow for some narrative framing. The photos could then link back to Flickr for people who wanted to see the larger versions, annotate them, add individual comments to the images, etc.
I’ll probably use MT to implement the site that shares these—I’d rather have a dedicated site rather than including the content here. I don’t know yet if it will be a traditional dated blog entry format, or simply MT as CMS in some other form.
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