Dog-eared, yellowed and musty, the family photo album has always been a great one for nostalgia trips. But it may soon be on its way to oblivion
Seventeen-year-old Niladri Sen, a first-year engineering student in Pune, likes leafing through the photo albums that store the many moments of his parents’ lives. But he cannot recollect having ever gone through the drill of taking, sorting out and pasting his photographs on an album. For Niladri, everything to do with a photograph involves uploading, downloading and saving on his computer desktop. “The photo albums I touch are on my iPhone,” he says.

At the other end of the town, veteran photographer Suhas Asnikar peers at some crinkled pictures as he turns the black pages of an old album. “This is how it was in the old days. Photography was not just an expensive profession but like painting and drawing, an art form. Snapping a roll into a camera, carefully adjusting the settings, developing a film, printing and then finally sliding it in place in one of these albums was like painting a masterpiece. It took time and the results etched memories in the hearts of the people,” he says.

Two different snapshots to the way we look back at our memories. Bimal Mukherjee, a photographer from Jadavpur, Kolkata, feels it is only natural that this change would set in. “True, I miss the Kodachrome rolls, the old-world SLR cameras, the heavy cumbersome equipment and also the old albums, but it’s not that bad. When the world moved from the old photographic plate cameras to the Kodachrome roll films, everyone thought it was the definitive answer to the photography needs of people. But with the revolution of cameras and photo editing software, the rolls are passé. So we need to learn to move on.”
The art of preservation of photographs has also seen a sea change. From the heavy cumbersome albums where you edged the pictures into corners to the light slip-in ones to the current digital frames—the transformation is there for all to see.

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