Displaying Photos and Paintings
Most people have photos, paintings, ornaments and general bric-a-brac adorning their homes. I’m not talking about fine art such as having an original Caravaggio on your wall. Just the kind regular people have. Framed pictures of loved ones, a quirky painting you bought at a Church Jumble sale or a vase you inherited from Aunt Edith. Alternatively you may have posters on the wall, or action figures on your desk. Humans like to customise their personal spaces and photos, paintings and ornaments present an opportunity to do so. My own home is no different. Mrs P maintains multiple picture frames around the house, frequently updating the photos of grandchildren and other family members. Oddly, I am conspicuously absent from these. She also has a few paintings on the wall in the lounge that have sentimental associations. This is a key factor. It’s not just the things themselves that bring pleasure but how they make us feel. Or whether there’s a story attached to them.
Photos
Every few months Mrs P announces to the world in general in a rhetorical flourish “we need to go through all the photos and get some printed”. What photos are these you may well ask. The endless litany of pictures featuring our grandchildren, taken by our son and daughter-in-law. These arrive via WhatsApp on a daily basis. Being of the Instagram generation our son’s family copiously document their lives and share it on social media. Conversely, Mrs P is from the analogue generation where photos must be printed and placed in albums. All pictures remain conspicuously unannotated so in years to come you can argue over who is in them, what year it was and where they were taken. And returning to Mrs P’s statement about getting them printed, that falls to me because “it’s all done online nowadays” and that is apparently my department.