Losing all your photos, how bad is it?

Journalist Jocelyn de Kwant had planned on sorting her photographs into albums for years. But when her husband’s hard drive was stolen, all the photographs of her children’s baby years were suddenly gone. Losing all her photos was rough, but it also resulted in some powerful insights.

It was almost as if someone had died. That’s how hard it hit my husband and I when we found out his laptop had been stolen. Or, more specifically, that the external hard drive that held all of our photographs from the previous five years was gone. Five years during which our two children had been born. All of their baby photographs, gone. The first smiles. The first steps. All of our holidays. Our honeymoon.

We’d slowly stop crying and sit on the couch in silence, staring into space, only to suddenly remember another loss—the first vacation we went on with our little van. All our videos, too. That one where Suzy giggles uncontrollably—and we’d burst into tears again.

Then there was the anger. Why was the external drive in the same bag as the computer? What use is an external drive then? Bad luck of course. And stupid, to leave your bag out on the street in the city. But you know how it goes: One child is crying, your telephone rings, you’re looking for the house keys and, before you know it, you’ve left your bag outside…

Ah well, how bad is losing your photos anyway?

At first, I consoled myself by thinking the pictures couldn’t actually be gone. I hoped my husband would suddenly remember he’d just left his bag at work. Or I told myself that someone would bring the bag back, hopefully soon. I plastered the neighborhood with flyers hoping anyone with information about it would contact me. But no.

I told everyone about it, and always got the same incredulous and sympathetic response: “Oh no! All of your kids’ baby pictures?!” Everyone shared my pain. Except for one friend, who shrugged her shoulders and just said, “Ah well.” She told me she doesn’t care much about photographs anyway. I would get really worked up about that comment, lying in my bed at night; Who on earth doesn’t care about photographs? Easy to say if you still have yours.

Send me my lost photos and videos, please

I also felt like a dunce. Why hadn’t I slapped those thousands of pictures into albums yet? I had two half-finished baby albums, and some loose photographs in a box, but that was it. It had been on my to-do list for years: Make family photo albums. Or at least get one of those store-printed albums made.

I really didn’t take care of them at all, come to think of it. Sometimes I didn’t even look at the photographs I had taken. Well, that quickly changed. After the loss, I treasured each and every picture I found tucked away in old diaries or in a pile of cards. I was ecstatic with every photo I could get my hands on.

And there were actually quite a lot. For example, there were many in my e-mails. Some of which I had never even downloaded. I worked my way through my inbox like Sherlock Holmes, tracking down hidden treasures. And it gave me an idea: other people are constantly snapping pictures of everything around them, so that includes us. I sent all my friends and family an e-mail asking if they had any pics of us to share.

In the following days, my inbox filled up with pictures, some of which I had never seen before. And it turned out, my father had kept a very orderly archive of all the photos I had sent him —what a hero. I also discovered I had an old Dropbox link with a few pictures. And although I’m not a big sharer on Facebook, I also found a few treats there. We did quite well.

Still, a lot of our photographs and videos remain lost forever. At first, I was devastated by it. But after a while, I noticed something else: oddly, I didn’t miss most of the pictures at all. There were just a few that really stuck in my mind, which I really wanted back. I had usually e-mailed those to someone else, and once I had a few of those essential pictures back, I started feeling relieved and happy again.

The value of just one picture

Slowly but surely, another type of relief emerged: Whereas before I had made a feeble start on my family albums, now I could really pour my heart into making one. It was going to be incomplete anyway. The volume of photographs from the previous five years had suddenly become a manageable heap—fabulous. What’s more, all together, I had more pictures from a five-year period than my grandmother had of her whole life.

And another bonus was the fact that the pictures I still had became more valuable. As a result, I started looking at them more closely. And boy, does a picture pack a lot of information. One picture of an event is actually far more meaningful than twenty. When you look at that one picture, your memory and imagination fill in everything around it. Looking at pictures becomes a very different and more intense experience.

How many moments did I miss?

After a while, I started feeling uncomfortable about something. Why had I spent all that time behind my camera, precisely at very special moments, when it turns out so many of those  pictures can easily be done without? How often had my daughter seen the back of my phone instead of her mommy’s face? How many moments did I miss because I was busy deleting pictures from a full SD card? Every time I was taking a photograph, I was removing myself from the situation and becoming an observer. What a waste.

That was two years ago and looking back, the experience has been an amazing eye-opener. Life is what happens while you’re busy taking pictures. It has changed my approach to photographs for good, and I spend less time on them. When I feel that instinctive need to take a picture now, I control myself and instead I sit down to enjoy the moment. I keep watching, feeling, hearing, participating. Instead of reducing an experience to a two-dimensional picture, I create a memory.

Text Jocelyn de Kwant Photogaphy Maja Topcagic, Gillian van Niekerk, Mosuno/Stocky United