With Neptune in aspect to Venus, I have a great sensitivity to photographs. In spite of leaving all kinds of things behind, I have not disposed of a photograph or marred one in anyway (like marking out someone’s face). Nothing against people who purge. I’m just saying if I ever took your picture, I still have it.
Today I was digging through my husband’s pictures to find whatever pictures he had of his friend and thinking of how precious these images are and of the abuses I have seen over the years that are centered around photographs.
For example, when a man gets divorced, invariably the wife keeps all the family pictures. I knew one man (a Scorpio) whose wife gave him negatives only, she gave him not one print of their children. I know another man who did get some pictures; he got all the super blurry pictures no one would want, that should have been thrown out in the first place. He got picture of his baby’s diaper for example, with no face in it.
In my family, I wound up with all the pictures both from my parents and from Henry and in both cases I sat down and dealt them into four piles, one for myself and one for each of my sibs. People tend to take pictures in groups or in a series so I made sure we each got a picture of a certain family picnic whenever possible. I did this because it was fair but also because if someone’s house burned down… well there would still be an image available.
I did that in my 20’s, mailing or delivering a package to each sib and maybe you can imagine my surprise when I found out other people have other methods. For example, some people divide up the pictures by family feud. If you are the black sheep in the family, you get shit. Worse, some people who wind up with family pictures hoard every single picture for themselves due some flimsy justification or form of exercising their power and control. Whatever the reason, it pains me.
When I met my husband’s friends on our honeymoon, I promptly came home and scanned every picture he had that might be of interest to them, copying his son at the same time. When I found out my childhood friend had died, I immediately sent her family every picture I had of her. In that case, her mother’s house had burned to the ground and almost all their family pictures had been lost.
If you are one of those people sitting on all the pictures as if you’re entitled and others are not, I hope this post inspires you to share the love because it is your character that is told when you withhold like this.
Regarding the father’s day story, my husband has precious few pictures of his friend to send the man’s daughter. This is not because pictures weren’t taken. It’s because someone(s) decided he did not need to have them.
While I am aware of the repercussions on this end, I wonder what the repercussions are on the other end and I am happy to say I will never have to find out.
Call this a cautionary tale. Call it what you want but if you’re sitting on another person’s pictures in any form, I hope this inspires you and I hope it inspires you today. Twenty years ago someone stole my baby book. Hmm.
pictured – that is my mother and my grandmother – early 1940’s.
I have a small collection of photographs I’ve found on the street on left random places. It makes me sad physical prints are becoming obsolete, they are so incredibly intimate in a weird out of context way.
When my ex (kids father) and I divorced he refused to let me have my children’s birth certificates. The ones with the foot prints on them. His new wife (the Aqua) took a picture of her shredding them and sent me that. It broke my heart in a million pieces because it took great effort for me to have my sons in the first place. Took seven years of disappointment to have my second child. Then, they did that for sport.
I found all his childhood black and white pictures in a box and somehow they ended up in my part of the move. I took them to him. Handed him the box full of old photos and told him to remember that I could have done the same thing….shredded his memories but didn’t have the heart. I asked him to remember that.
All I have for birth certificates now are the standard crap you get from the court house. It pains me just thinking about it. Even if he didn’t want me to have them, couldn’t he have saved them for the boys? Maybe his children would have liked to have them ….
It was hateful and mean. Years later they wondered why after that and so many other horrible insults I finally pointed my Stellium at them and let loose.
Nobody wins in these situations, but there is only so much pain you can point at a person.
That’s so hateful and sick. Who could bring themselves to do that?
Oh Soup…what a messed up thing to do. It’s great that you behaved with integrity and class. You are so right that nobody wins. 🙁
I have ended up with all the family photos and I’m the oldest of our parents children. I moved to the house I now live in in 2014 and due to situations I have not completed moving into this house. I have the pictures in my closet and have not looked at them in YEARS!. Though I want to get them all out and sort and get them in some kind of order I to date have not had the opportunity. My plan is to get them all scanned onto a DVD disk and distribute them to each sibling and also give each sibling a package so that just on the by chance something should happen there will be complete copies. Of course I don’t know who alot of the people are anymore. Still I must do this it is only fair.
My brother came cross-country to visit a few years after our mom died & I told him while he was there we should go through her pics, which I ended up with. We had a great time reminiscing, many laughs, some tears, and during this, he was setting some aside rather than returning back to the trunk o’ pics. When we were done, he handed me his large bunch & said, “these are the ones I think you can throw away.” Wha??
Nope, the pictures will stay all mine.
I am a picture person. I catalogue, scan, give copies, make notations since I remember a lot of family history. I would not DREAM of not sharing pictures even to a person I don’t like. They have an equal right, as does any family coming after them.
I completely agree with you, Elsa. Hard to believe people don’t see it that way.
My baby album was stolen as well, about 12 years ago. I know it was one of 3 people who stole it, just not sure which one. What would cause a person to want to steal something so precious to another person? They could have destroyed it for all I know. It makes me sick.
I (or rather, my husband) figured out who took the album since this was written.
Arrrrgh.
My Moms older sister had tons of family photo’s from the early 1900’s thru the sixties and had always promised to give me some (she felt bad that I had so few). Sadly, she had a massive stoke that she never came back from. Her oldest daughter (who lived out of state) apparently wound up with the photo’s and since she died those photo’s are lost to the family forever. One of my cousins is a wiz at all this computer stuff and put together quite a few and is sharing them. It’s still a shame so many were lost. 🙁
i wish i had taken photos of me and my two best friends back then. We just weren’t picture people. It was me and the cap sun/pisces moon, the Scorpio sun/stellium with libra moon, and strangely we just didnt bother to take photos. But the memories of us were still so very real and alive. it’s strange but i just was thinking of this last night and reminiscing.Those are one of the few things i regret when we all parted ways, got married and moved away.
My maternal grandmother always had a camera in hand! Thus boxes and boxes of photos! My dad, brother and I take pictures. Brother posts and sends to extended family near and wide from old slides, super 8, video, etc. and makes a DVD and u-tube posts. And he gives us digital photo frames for gifts loaded with family pictures spanning the generations.
When former hubby left I made sure he had the photo albums he came with and gave him our wedding pictures that we blew up and framed as the duplicates are in a bound book that I kept. (He had 2 photos from his first wedding). Our photo albums over the years of holidays, birthdays, vacations, etc. I am in the process of scanning everything and will give him copy when finished. I have emailed him photos of the pets and his tree he planted years ago as it bloomed for the first time and he thanked me.
Photos and memories are sacred. It brought tears to my eyes when I read above how a spiteful ex destroyed birth certificates and other photos so none remain for either party or their children. I would never destroy or withhold our pictures together even tho we are no longer a couple. I am sharing with him the photos we took over the years, he can do with them what he wants. (Venus in 7th aspect Moon in 2nd)
I have a sibling who has hoarded all the family photographs, some going back to the early 20th century, and including ones of myself as a baby and very young child. Luckily, I have some – including ones of an ancestor who came out on a tea clipper from England in 1905, which were given to me by my mother before she passed.
I was The unofficial historian of my friends and family or rather the family I made of my friends because I was an emancipated minor but I still treasured everything that came before every memory and I have a long memory very long memory. I found out someone suddenly that my house is going to be foreclosed upon and as for digital photos I had several dozen boxes that contain floppy disks of photos which I had never gotten onto different forms of medium and partly that was because oh it was because a lot of things. I tried to pack some up is best it’s possible but I was in a really destructive relationship after my marriage ended and my computer was smashed as well as a lot of these disks destroyed and original recordings cuz I used to be a professional musician which is another story because it wasn’t actually career I wanted to be into but I did not say no to people. I had a stroke shortly after I turned 30 and took up photography on the tours I still had booked for music and so I had all these digital pictures and all these actual pictures and I had been taking actual pictures since childhood my parents were actually pretty tolerant about that when it was pretty expensive and you just got that one shot when I took some artsy weird-ass Scorpio Aquarius rising shots with the flash cubes in the seventies when I was 4 years old I had all these pictures in the suitcase and I was in a car accident on the way back@for my storage space in my house and stuff things so many things glitz blessings right that was supposed to say mixed I’m doing talk-to-text. And it was kind of darkly funny 8th house stellium that in the car pile up the person who started it with the local TV show host before there was cable when I was a kid so that was just sort of odd and I ended up in the ICU and my car ended up in in pound and there ended up being a Mercury retrograde and my phone number ended up being Miss recorded is that even a word? do you want my phone number down incorrectly at the village of rich people where the accident occurred and my car ended up being demolished with all the photographs in it. And then I was in the hospital and I had my storage space which I was paying for but the mortgage company had in the same storage lot 40 months offered volunteered actually taken without my permission the majority of my laundry furniture and put it in the unit where they were going to keep it benevolently for a month and then charge me exorbitant prices from then on. and I have a security deposit and first and last months rent in a different place in a duplex and then this accident happened and I was in the hospital for quite a while it was in the beginning of May when the accident occurred in the storage space that the mortgage demons we’re holding on to was expiring a few days later. And that needed to be paid for them to not release my belongings to the four winds and I was on the phone with the storage company in the people there were so nice and so apologetic they wouldn’t take a credit card over the phone and they wouldn’t take the man who I was seeing at the time whiscash as far as the mortgage company space was concerned they refuse to do the business that way the storage space had nothing to do with it. So I lost almost all of my furniture and things that I had accumulated over 21 years of owning a home and 18 years of marriage and I actually cried for a couple seconds I even cast a chart for that moment yes that losing all my stuff was a Taurus the foreclosure was in Aries in the lightness of not having all that shit that reminded me of the times in the last decade that just weren’t working it was actually really awesome because suddenly I could go anywhere without having to worry about all this stuff weighing me down. But the pictures when I find something that someone else has I immediately scan it in I’m very glad that I did bother to take some pictures of pictures after my father passed away when I was at my mother’s and that they are in my Google photos but at least my memory is long detail I wish I had those photographs however. I was lucky enough for my little brother and I to find photo somehow Alaska to New York when we were so young he was 17 I was 20 a friend of ours we’ve discovered had passed away was with us in the photo he was 18 and we’re in alphabet City actually no in Spanish Harlem on top of a roof I want to know who took the picture I can’t remember because I was always the one with the camera but I’m in the picture I’m so glad that there’s that picture because I didn’t know the thing existed and for years I was convinced only one photographic and taking of me the entire time I lived in New York for 18 months buy my cookie Capricorn landlady by the Atlantic right after I dyed my hair black. I need to know more to see more photographs to collect because our family hi storian’s on my father’s side are gone and I have all the stories in my head stranger than fiction in fact maybe I should write them down and pass them off as fiction on both sides of the family sometimes it’s just to 8th house to believe.
My 8H Libra Sun is conjunct asteroid Photographica (#443). I am the family photographer and holder of the generational multi-media. I also have researched my family tree. My 4H Gemini Mars trines my Sun.
8th house Sun regardless if sign sez it all.
I’m an 8th H Taurus Sun and I not only have pics but report cards, commendations, the family books/magazines/newspapers which mark certain eras and events we as a family thought significant in some way.
I have things from both deceased parent as well as de eased aunts etc.
My eldest brother has been deceased for over 40yrs now. I have his report cards n loads of pics.
I’m divorced but I have the majority of wedding, baby (our 3 children n now 3grands) and other pics.
I’ve divided all who still survives ‘stuff’ in piles and have been BEGGING them all to come get their ‘stuff’.
I know I’m the ‘legacy’ guy behind this 8th house placement.
But my fear as I age is I’ll die and when they come to clear out they’ll throw stuff out in a hurry to get the job done.
Part of my 8th house thing has been to escort folks to their graves.
This means being around em n absorbing final words/thotghts/memories…and their stuff.
In many cases I was forced to do unpleasant things with these folks stuff because I’m already overwhelmed as it is.
So to avoid this I’m trying yo be proactive and get everybody to get their ‘stuff’. If they want to throw it out fine.
But I CAN NOT AND WILL NOT.
I’m unable to part with these things unless it’s to the rightful owners.
Hopefully they’ll soon come to my aid
still going through the ex’s stuff. pretty sure i’ll find their box of photos eventually.