Photo Tradition Slip-Slidin' Away

The Boston Herald

The wallpaper was gray with flourishes of pink and magenta running through it, sprigs that looked like feathers on an old lady's hat, or the kind of pen George Washington would have used. It covered the living room walls and a stairwell in the house where I grew up, a small cape built in 1953. I remember the wallpaper vividly, not just because it was - ahem - memorable but because it was the backdrop for just about every indoor picture my father took.

It's there behind me as I posed in my First Communion dress. It's there clashing with my plaids on every first day of school. It's the backdrop in all Christmas photos, the incongruous prelude to Confirmation, graduation from eighth grade and to every high school dance.

My father was always taking pictures. For a man with just one child, he went through a lot of film. He had a ritual. I'd stand on the stairs, halfway between up and down, and he'd stand not at the bottom but to the side, in the middle of the living room. And he'd always say, "Turn this way. That's good. Now think about ice cream” if it were summer. Or "think about cocoa" if it were winter. Or "think about boys" when I got older.

And I'd smile. He always made me smile. And then he'd click and a week or a month later, he'd bring home the developed film and after dinner, when it was dark, he'd drag out the projector and my mother and I would sit on the living room couch and watch a bigger me fill one entire wall.

My father used the wall as a screen. He had to. He didn't have the real thing. Sometimes he'd tack up a white sheet over the wallpaper. But the sheet rippled and the images wavered and that would annoy him. So most times he made do with the wall, telling us we should ignore the pink and magenta feathers coming out of my head, telling us to try and imagine how great these pictures would look someday projected on a big, wide, state-of-the-art screen.

He got his screen eventually. But it took a while because a screen was a luxury and paychecks were used on necessities back then and people didn't buy things on time. They saved up.

So while my father saved, we put up with feathers. It wasn't a problem. We got to the point where we didn't notice them or the gray pallor of things until someone, like my Aunt Lorraine, pointed them out. "Why don't you just take normal pictures like everyone else?" she asked, normal being the square black and white photos from a Brownie camera. But my father believed in color, in Ektachrome and Kodachrome and the enduring qualities of both. The feathers were temporary, he said. The photos were forever.

He was right. I have them now. They fill boxes. Each picture is labeled and dated. I have the projector too, though not the screen. It's a big thing to lose or misplace. But it's gone.

It's been years since I've watched these slides. Nobody watches slides anymore. They put them on video. Which is why Eastman Kodak Co., the No. 1 U.S. manufacturer of slide projectors, has announced that it's not going to be making slide projectors anymore.

I'm not shocked. I'm not even sad. The slide projector had a good run. But it's as dated as gray wallpaper and a house financed with a G.I. loan.

No more cocking your head to see a picture sideways. No more light bulb failure. No more loading and unloading. And jamming and unjamming. No more slide projector whine. And no more walls used as makeshift screens.

Video is clearer and easier and better. But it's not an occasion.

And watching slides was.