I was trying to find storage space for some stuff when I ran into a drawer full of… this.
These, as everyone of my generation would recognize but no one born in this century would, are 35 mm negatives, cut into manageable sections and neatly archived in semi-transparent paper sleeves folded inside cardboard sleeves or envelopes. The latter were provided by the photo processing laboratory that developed your film into negatives and then printed the photos on paper. When we were in California we used the 1-hour photo drive-up chain; in Jerusalem mostly Photo Schwartz, the legendary camera store that survived well into the digital age but recently closed.
The sleeves and envelopes came in standard forms but bore diverse printed designs, mostly promoting the lab or a film brand, like Kodak or Agfa.
The negatives, in case you wonder, had little numbers below the frames, so you could specify which frames you wanted printed; although for starters most people just had the lab technician print all frames that were not ruined by poor exposure or a finger obscuring the shot.
And I shudder to think how much effort I’ve put into archiving all these negatives, which are meticulously annotated with month and content. Of course the idea was that come one day I may wish to print extra copies… a day that never came. And now, decades later, all these media, containing raw memories from 20-30 years, are ready to go to the trash, the usual fate of all obsolete media.
Oh well, it’s not like the billions of photos being uploaded to the cloud today will do any better in 50 years…