Aide Memoire

I gave the hard drive a spring clean.

It was a tedious process involving sifting my photo files . My finger hovered over the mouse for a moment before committing approx 4500 photo files to the ether. I noted 26 gigabytes of information disappeared from the trash can on both hard drive and its doppelgänger the back up drive.The cull erased one in four photo files.

Most of the deletions were straightforward - duplicates of other files or duds. Bad composition, exposure errors or out of focus; they served no purpose. Others photos were ok but were not good enough to merit retention. These moments in time were cast into oblivion.

It's a forlorn procedure deleting representations of a moment . When younger there is the thrill of the purge and the tabula rasa. There is time to fill up the hard drive (real or metaphorical). As you get older it can be a melancholy experience .

When we lived in Twickenham we used to walk past a gallery called the Orleans. I went one day and saw an exhibition of photos from the 19th century explorer Sir Richard Burton. Burton is famous as an explorer of the Great Lakes of Africa and translating One Thousand and One Nights. Burton and his wife are buried in a remarkable tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent in St Mary Magdalen's Church in Mortlake southwest London. If you get the opportunity I recommend a visit - it is a striking (and macabre) monument of empire.

One photo in the exhibition at the Orleans gallery stopped this viewer in his tracks. It was a momento mori of Burton on his deathbed. These post mortem photos were popular in the Victorian era. The dead would be posed in a photo for the benefit of the bereaved .Thankfully the practice largely ceased in the early 20th century. The modern sensibility can do without post mortem photos as aide memoire.