Rescued Film

Per their website,

"The Rescued Film Project is an online archive gallery of images that were captured on film between the 1930's and late 1990's.  Each image in our archive was recovered from found film from locations all over the world, and came to us in the form of undeveloped rolls of film.  We have the capability to process film from all era's.  Even film that has been degraded by heat, moisture, and age.  Or is no longer manufactured."

I've been looking at the photos for over 30 minutes, and I can't stop looking through them. What if the next photo has a picture of someone I know? What if there's an abandoned photo of me in there? My mom? A kid I went to school with? I know that I lost film and disposable cameras at times in my life, and other people have as well.

What if some of those photos are of my grandparents? I wouldn't even know if the young woman in the 1940s was my grandma or her sister or someone else. Would I recognize a photo if it was of my mom as a toddler?  Nope!

These lost moments in time, who are they, and what does each photo mean. I stare into each person's face and look for a recognizable quirk of their eyebrow, I look at the background for signs that they were taken someplace I know. Is that the same knick knack that Julie's mom had near the tv? Did I just see the hallway at my old high school? No, that's somewhere else. Wait, that wedding, I've seen that wedding dress before. No, I haven't, it's one of a million wedding dresses that looked alike in the 1980s.

What memories are captured on this site never to be seen again? They developed a stack of film from an unknown WWII soldier. What are the chances that the people in these photos are even alive, let alone going to take a look at the website.

What will happen to my photo albums when I die? My pictures are largely unlabeled, and I don't have kids to pore over the albums like I went through my parent's albums and yearbooks as a kid. They'll be tossed in a rubbage heap somewhere when I'm the only person left who even knows they exist. My dad would recognize that photo of Gloria from back in high school, but my niece has never heard of her; I doubt my sister even remembers her. I've no idea whatever happened to her once she moved away.

In another 50 years, everything I know now will be gone. The photos I took as a kid won't mean anything to anybody but me and maybe a few random people in the world who I may or may not still be in contact with (or may not even be alive). I don't even know who that dark haired girl is in the background of that photo I took of Melissa when she was rolling her eyes at me on a Girl Scout trip. By the time I'm 90, no one around me will even know that I took that photo of Melissa or who the photo is of.

Heck, if she saw photos today of me ten years ago, she probably wouldn't recognize them if they weren't labeled. Like this unlabeled photo of me taken in 2006.  Heck, my own father wouldn't even know this was a picture of me or why it's so important to me!

Weird.