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.
Awe Elsa- this touches my heart so much! I LOVE my pictures, and treasure them (and yes share them)- In addition, I’ve got a collection of photographs of people that have long been dead that I’ve purchased from antique stores, many of which I’ve framed and hang on my walls. I’ve collected them for years- to me, they feel like they’ve been seperated from their families and that they just needed to be adopted and honored somehow… (I have one that I’m sure is an ancestor of Robin Williams, he looks so much like him) 🙂 My husband doesn’t have a fraction of the photos I have, but he keeps them in a special box (that his father made him). When we got married, he showed them to me and pointed out who was who- He was thrilled when I asked him if he would mind if I framed them and hung them on the walls.
Wonder where the Astrology fits in? Maybe my packed 4th house?
I love this so much I want to bring you cookies for these people and you. I lost the majority of my pictures in a fire and a move and I would be happy imagining that those who didn’t burn came into such fortune after I lost them because they deserved it. I read that and wondered how much you had in your fourth house or cancer ♋️…. aww
Oh God, this really hits a nerve. My parents had this wonderful old cardboard suitcase FULL of family photos of everything from their courtship right through all five of our childhoods. Old relatives from boths sides a couple of generations back are all in there. And there were tons of Super 8 films of family holidays. We used to love going through them.
My psycho triple-Scorpio sister (no joking) emotionally blackmailed my father into giving her the lot after my mother died and now none of the rest of us have any. Not one photo will she share.
My Mars in cancer and cancer moon has words for that sister!
My family is CLAN/TRIBE to the core–including extended family and ‘known associates'(friends, etc). Awareness of these connections, communication and ‘looking out for your own’ is the closest thing to any actual religion we’ve got in common.
In that vein, pictures and souveniers (in the truest French meaning of “memory”) are considered and treated akin to holy artifacts. They are communal, powerful, meaningful.
The few times people have attempted to use these items’ inherent power as interpersonal currency, the repercussions have been pretty shocking and unilateral (and somewhat shortlived).
The advent of so many options for sharing, saving, restoring and archiving photos have lent themselves to a beautiful renaissance of our urge to share images with anyone and everyone to whom they might matter (and probably lots of folks to whom they don’t-hah!).
Interesting parallels to this phenom that i’ve noticed are; being able to ‘suss out the internal politics present at any given time by virtue of who’s in/out and where positioned in a photo, and…the more active control-seekers in our family are invariably the ones running around with cameras and rounding people up for group shots, etc (hmmn..I confess I resemble that remark…d’oh!)
One ‘lesson learned’ is, especially as elders grow even more elderly…document, document! Names, times, locations and what is the backstory…To me it’s even more fun when the stories and recollections are at odds from person to person. 🙂
Thank you for writing on a topic near and dear (maybe a little bit? just a wee?) to me. Sorry to go on and on…
I was just e-mailing my sister photos from this past weekend family gathering that she missed.
This sister has been scanning the old family photos that my mom has. Unfortunately, the really old ones are not marked and we don’t know who they are.
my mother in law sent each of her children photos a few years back. one of the pics she included in my husband’s album was a picture with his ex wife sitting in his lap. she said their daughter might like to see “there was a time they were happy.” the daughter was over 18 at the time.
she also sketched a scene from one of our trip photos we gave her. i was in the pic, but i wasn’t in the drawing. i laughed that she wanted me out of the picture.
passive aggressive pictures.
my initial post is spam, perhaps? 🙁
I am the proud owner of my grandmother’s photo album, and recently had the pleasure of sharing some of them with an on-line acquaintance who was related to some of the people in the pictures. I had met her on an on-line genealogy site, and she was quite pleased.
CP, if so it is not there yet. The spam posts come in, in batches so if your comment was sucked into the filter, it may not appear for 15-20 min.
I, too, have tons of photos of other people. I have a ‘camera bug,’ I guess, and I’m always snapping pics of everyone and everything.
It has been my pleasure, many times, to give folks snaps of departed loved ones they didn’t know existed.
@Sue Ellen, we are getting ready for a family reunion and I have been scanning old photos so the elders in our family can identify everyone in them! And many hugs to opal and goddess, both of those situations are just cruel – that’s awful.
I’ve never had specific thoughts about pictures, but I agree with the way you see/treat them, Elsa. Venus in loose conjunct to Neptune. 🙂
I’m divorcing, and have no children. After my recent move, I decided to go through the pictures. All of the ones that were of just me, or my family, I kept. All the ones that were just him, or his family, I’ve put into boxes for him. I don’t know when I’ll be able to give him those boxes, or if he’ll want them. He doesn’t seem to value pictures like I do. All the pictures of both of us, or one of us mixed with the other’s family, I’ve put into a box that will sit in storage until my next move (1-2 years). Hopefully I’ll have the distance from the divorce to deal with them in a fair manner by then.
On the other hand, I want *all* the pictures my parents have. They’re pictures of my childhood and my parents’ young adulthood, and my parents do not take care of any material possession. If I could be confident the pictures would be taken care of, I would have no problem leaving them where they’re at…but no.
there it is in all its copious length–sheesh!
figured it would *poof up* at some point, but then, I’m the gal found tapping her foot in front of the microwave muttering ‘c’mon..c’mon!’…
thx!
(((opal)))
I have only a couple of old photos as my mother has kept most of them. I do have one sister that systematically scratched out my face as well as another siblings face. She took a heap of the photos a few years back and then her house burned down, and my mother was furious. I imagine one day we’ll have to hash it all out…for some reason that one sister thinks she’s entitled to them all and it is so weird!
This is a subject dear to my heart. I am the family record keeper; that record is done in pictures! I love them. I have boxes and boxes of photo albums, most of them I have taken myself (my husband is a family photo nut as well; Cancer sun). The most precious photos in the collection are the ones I inherited from my mother as well as those I scanned that belong to my grandmother. I have photos of family members going back to the old tin-types!
But the mania doesn’t stop there. I love looking at other people’s pictures as well. Better if I know them, but it’s OK if I don’t. I like looking at faces and trying to get a feel for the person in the photo.
A cousin, when he knew he was dying, entrusted all of his old family photos to my keeping (they were mostly of his father’s family who I did not know). He said he knew he could trust me to look after them.
Well, there it is; I’m insane when it comes to photos of family. I even revere the photos of strangers; I would never willingly deface or destroy one.
Moon in Cancer in the 4th.
Great post. I inherited a shoebox full of photos of distant cousins, etc. Now most of them are on Facebook, and this weekend I’m going to sort them, scan them (for me) and send the originals to their respective, rightful homes. I’m almost giddy about this!
That sucks, opal. There’s a circle in Hell for people like that.
I have scanned most of the family photos I have collected. They have been burned to disk and shared with everyone. New photos get e-mailed immediately. I think maybe some of my relatives aren’t as into it as I am (LOL), but that doesn’t slow me down!
Demelza, you never know. There may be a grand kid or a great grand kid who really prizes the stuff.
Ugh. This post brings back a whole lot of bad memories and family disfunction over photos. Maybe because of this I have very little attachment to my own family photos. I find most of them a bit creepy to be honest.
@ Peppermint, get the photos identified while you can!!! My mom is 87 and didn’t get with her aunt to ID the old photos. Her aunt has been gone for many years.
Thanks for writing that, Sue Ellen. None of my husband’s pics are marked! I will get on that soon! Today I mistook his brother for his friend. The funny thing is once I mistook his brother for his ex-wife (he had long hair in the pic) so maybe that guy is just a Pisces !
Can you believe it
Neptune flat on MH, I am a photographer and biologist.
My family said that: “I am a looser” . A taurus with a grand cross, neptune opp mars on 3 house.
I have very good puctures, they don’t.
Yep, pictures are powerful alright. My friend is going through a nasty patch in his marriage, and he told me last week that his wife has gone through their wedding pictures and ripped them up and delivered them to him in pieces. Poor guy is gutted. Imagine the power of that gesture.
Reading all these comments, I am really glad I decided to post this today. I had my concerns but clearly things like this should be said.
Thanks everyone for weighing in.
When I left my first husband i took all of our pictures. A few weeks or months later I handed him the pictures I had sorted out that were of the kids or him and didn’t include me. He wouldn’t have wanted the ones with me. He was shocked. I only took them because I didn’t trust him to give me the ones I wanted. He would have been vengeful. The sorting was a task I needed to do myself.
I keep all of my pics, letters too. And after one of my friend’s husband died, I went through my stash and found a whole group of photos of him from our younger days and gave them to her. We hadn’t seen each other in years, but just looking at the images brought back such joy. She used some of them in a slide show at his memorial service. It was such an honor for me and I can’t imagine what I would have felt had I tossed them.
I have a stack to give my ex. I really have to get on that–especially because he just had a flood and lost a ton of family/baby photos.
It’s fabulous that photos can be duplicated and shared digitally now. It used to be that there was one copy and that was it… or you had negatives and had to go to great lengths to get them printed. No more custody issues, unless the holder has custody issues.
Kathy, that is just messed up and vile. Ripping up someone’s image and sending it to them is a wholly unnecessary form of psychic fucking-over.
My husband and I were discussing this and both figure people who do something like this (Kathy’s story) feel justified in the moment and I bet they continue to hold that line as time passes but it sure must be hard on the soul.
That is another question. Do people consider their soul? Most people do eventually, I think.
I don’t. I think they do the nasty deed and move on, even forget what they did. It’s the people who consider the soul who don’t do it in the first place.
I am pretty sure the sibling who has defaced my image in photograph over and over feels justified. Positive, in fact.
goddess, just read your post. That is so twisting the knife, meow!
Reading this just triggered an early childhood memory of confused puzzlement over photos with little round holes where a head had been or partially torn out. There was also a scarcity photos of not so distant family members, to be fair this may have been due to war plus 3 of my grandparents were deceased long before I was born but now I’m wondering.
Like Togi and for similar reasons, I don’t care much about the family photos that do exist so I’m not upset over the ones I never had to begin with. Yet I do have some curiosity about my past generations. On paper or online, I love sharing my pix and seeing my friends family pix and the wonderful archival libraries made public e.g. flickr, one of the many great places to share!
Neptune conjunct Venus and Jupiter, trine Moon. There’s nothing like a photo that can really take me back to a moment in time. I absorb a lot through photos and images and have kept tons of photos. They always hold wonder as well as memories. Even photos where I wasn’t there I can feel transported into it. Old family photos are so precious. I really need to take the advice about making sure that they are all labeled, dated, etc.
The withholding or destruction of photos is a selfish and spiteful act. I think it’s an ugly attempt to try to control a person’s history and ties. It’s like they want to separate the people in the images to obtain a controlled interaction to their liking.
Hooray to all of you who have saved photos from this horrible fate. 🙂
Yeah, I know my sister feels perfectly justified, and I know that she will hang on to them till she dies. Some people are just that f***ed up.
(((opal, goddess))) Sorry to hear of your photo dramas. Kind of destroys one’s faith in others, no ?
My ex was very stubborn about moving out, so much so that I had to pack his things and tell him when they would be picked up ! He never asked me for any photos of the kids. He had a slide projector and boxes of slides of his days of debauchery with his biker chums; he eventually asked for these. But not the kids, and he was trying to get custody. Hmmm.
Anyway, when he moved out, I packed the things he would most essentially need; working out the rest was up to him, I figured. I had a scanner, and would have gladly given the prints to him after burning them to a disc for myself, but he never asked.
When he died, I went through the pictures, first to contribute requested ones to his memorial service. I made sure I was’nt in any of them because I did’nt attend. Then, I sorted them by child, scanned them to disc, and made scrapbooks for each of my kids. Whatever our issues were, I’m heartbroken that they don’t have their dad anymore; so it’s important to me that they remember their dad and the all things that they shared.
While I’m not the sort who would deface or throw out photos, his vindictive behaviour during the divorce told me that he would be; so I stand by my decision to hold them and await a request for them.
Last year the Moving Wall (Vietnam Memorial) came through my town and one of my colleagues put together a story about a vet who had come to see the name of his best friend on that wall, with whom he’d served in Vietnam. He was with him when he was shot and killed in the war. For more than 40 years, he carried around a picture of his friend’s infant daughter, 6 months old at the time. This man yearned to give that picture to this now grown woman, but had long since lost contact with friends, family, etc. Someone saw my colleague’s story, and called to say that the now grown woman lived in Chicago. My colleague called her, she called her mom who now lives in Florida, and the two flew up to my town to have a reunion with this old soldier, talk about the father she never knew, and see that picture her father carried with him during the war. The resulting story just won a national award this past spring.
Maureen, that story made me tear up…
i don’t trust my parents with pictures. too many things get inadvertently destroyed there.
on the flip side, my mother has started to save for me pictures she comes across and thinks i want. i just received one from my baptism.
funny how time changes things.
i could never imagine anyone in my family destroying pictures. we care too much about history. i have some major geneology buffs on both sides.
I disagree – it depends on what he did. If he cheated on his (sounds like) soon to be ex-wife then maybe she has the right to rip up the photos.
I mean – he did promise until death they do part …
But then, I don’t know and if he didn’t do anything wrong then think she’s being a bit harsh.
To me they are just photos. Images taken through a mechanical tool. They are merely representations of a point in time not of a person’s soul.
My sister is good at saving things for the rest of us. She has most of the surviving photos in boxes in her bedroom. (Some got lost or damaged in moves.)
My Aunt also has things such as family photos… she has my parents’ wedding album (something I wish (*I* had, but I know she’s probably taken good care of it).
My mom divided our pics up but the problem is I don’t get to see my siblings pics! Will have to remedy. 🙂 They will share.
I’m great at distributing pictures and objects. My brother has boxes of our Mom’s stuff and he is the worst! He’d throw it out. Gotta get that stuff soon. Thanks for the reminder.
Very good timing for the holidays. Some may want to distribute things when seeing family or take some pictures. Perfect holiday/family/love post!! <3
I lost the pictures in the divorce. He chose to keep them. His mother sent me hers when she heard the story. He died, I got all of them back from my kids. My brother in law has recently sent videos of their family when they were young. It was very sentimental for my kids and sad for me to think of a happy child who had a difficult later life and passing. I will take great care to have these all scanned and saved. I know it means something. A life well lived!
My brother did this for my other brother and I. He’s just like that. It was a nice gesture. We all have photos of our childhood, including all the blurry unrecognizable photos!
You make a good point…the Aussie has no photos of his life. The ex ripped them all to shreds. 🙁
I have Venus trine Neptune and this post really hits home. I cannot throw out a picture, no matter if it really has nothing to do with me.
I had several great aunts from a large family who had no children – I was their substitute. I inherited their pictures.
I have spent hours and hours sorting through pictures – identifying people and then dividing them into piles to distribute amongst the descendants of the people identified in the pictures.
If there was a realy neat picture with several people, I made copies and divided those copies amongst their descendants.
Some people were very happy to get the pictures, some I never heard from and others kinda just were disinterested. I feel I just did my “duty” in trying to “repatriate” the picture with their loved ones.
Man does this strike a nerve. My dad’s side of the family, total photo hoarders. Photos have been considered province of the eldest sibling, so every time a great aunt or uncle died the photos would get passed on … but never shared! This is a large Italian family, 12 siblings, so all this changing hands has resulted in a lot of loss. One uncle had his garage cleaned out, and with it went boxes and boxes of photos. My dad and I still cry over that. Some have finally trickled down to my grandfather, but he’s the baby and talk about measly ends.
I still haven’t gone through my pictures, though I’ve been divorced over a year.
My newest picture project has been old family photos, like when my grandmother was young. My sister and I borrowed a ton of these, and more recent pictures from my grandmother when we were there this summer. We are scanning them for ourselves, and for Christmas, we are bringing them back to our grandmother, placed into nice photo albums (they were loose before).
We’re also going to print some of the scans of our parents, and make a photo album for them as well.
I have someone else’s pictures, but they’ve been ceded to me for safekeeping and appreciation. The someones in question have long passed, and My Mother The Saint gave me these the last time I was back east with her.
They are of my grandparents, great aunts and uncles, my great grandparents, and my great-great grandparents. <3 <3 <3
I have Venus/Neptune. Guess who my birth dad trusted with his old photo books after his death? Me!! : D
Two incidents stand out for me: After my divorce was final, I delivered copies (made at my expense) of all the photos during the 5 years we were together. He didn’t ask for them, nor did I received any acknowledgment or thank you. But that was irrelevant to me. Putting myself in his position, I felt he had the right to his history – who am I to disappear his own experiences? They were his to do whatever he wanted with them.
More recently, I was packing up my apt. and came across a folder of an ex-friend’s personal photos of her and her fiance/now-husband. I intensely dislike this person, who betrayed me after an 8 year friendship. The wound is still fresh. But without thinking I texted her I had her photos and would leave them outside my door for her to pick up, which she did. I never received a thank you. Afterward, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me that I would lift a finger to return this person’s photos. Any other item of theirs I would have gladly trashed. I kind of feel like a sucker and an idiot for returning the photos but at the time it was an immediate and natural response. Photos = sacred property.
Venus Square Neptune.