Deflated Balloons
I have this digital picture frame on my desk that was given to me three years ago by my daughter as a clear message that I not forget her or her children as Kim and I moved away to our West Coast hilltop. The only people that upload pictures to the digital file that cycles through the digital device, called a Nixplay, are Carolyn and myself. It sits in the alcove where my office desk sits and it faces towards the door to the Master Bath, so at odd hours of the night (hours which I frequently inhabit, unfortunately), I can see it shining as it flips through its pictures every few seconds. I have tried, both on the frame and on the online app that I have for Nixplay, to adjust the wake/sleep cycle of the device and for some reason that appears to be a combination of time zones and general incompetence on my part, I can’t fix the problem so that it sleeps while I am supposed to be asleep. This does not bother me enough to worry about it and I just consider it a long-distance night light for our bathroom. The only time I really look at the images is in the morning when I decide to sit at my desk to deal with bills or write a story or some such activity.
This concept of a digital frame is not new. I don’t really know the technological history or nuances of the product, but I seem to recall that there was some form of this digital frame almost 15-20 years ago, so I don’t think its fair to say its exactly revolutionary technology to put digital images on an internet (WiFi) connected device. There are certain technological devices that simply make logical sense and are therefore ubiquitously present in our lives. While we older folks like to reference the Dick Tracy communicator watch or the Star Trek flip-up communicator as examples of life imitating art, we have all seen these logical tech tools come to be in the form of the Apple Watch and the old Motorola flip-phone that has come and gone as we transitioned to more function-rich smart phones. Handheld mobile communication devices are now globally ubiquitous with 7.2 billion people of the 8 billion in the world having a smartphone of one form or another (whether on the wrist or in your pocket). Along the way, digital frames came to us along with the digitization of photography, and it has morphed, but never left us. Digital photography is simply a technology, like mobile communication, that makes tremendous sense for everyone and is a vast improvement over what existed before. Old silver halide film is just no longer available, so digital photography is not only prevalent, it is all by itself as the only logical medium for image capture and storage.
I have gone through the process of digitizing many of my old photographs, less because of space or even access convenience, and more as a way of insuring permanent preservation. I have photos from my mother that go back one or two generations before her, so certainly 120-150 years, and the photos may have faded or gotten dog-eared, but they are mostly intact. It always makes me wonder whether the preservation imperative is really as necessary as we all tend to consider it to be, since I’m not sure pictures of me on a tricycle in the driveway is the sort of image that the world will really need very much in the coming centuries. But, nevertheless, it has been done and now that I have another cache of photographs, sent to me by my sister from my mother’s archives (shoved into a storage room after her death five years ago) and my closing down of my Ithaca home which was a memorabilia repository for me fro 26 years. By the way, in the same way that my sister, Barbara, is finally getting around to cleaning out the old Mom storage room, I have now closed down Ithaca for good after a year of anticipation of that event. As of November 1, that house is back in the hands of the University and whatever they choose to do with it. I have a few more boxes out here to sort through and a check to get from the auction house that took the bulk of the furnishings, but otherwise, the purge is done.
The Nixplay digital frame does seem to get regular updates from my daughter, which is really nice since it gives me he heartwarming sight of my granddaughters, which I get on Snapchat and occasional texts, but which seem more personal when I get them on my Nixplay in my little office alcove. I’m not sure when I last put photos on Nixplay from my own iPhone, but I have a goodly number on there from a few years ago when I first got the device. The ones that always catch my notice more than others are the ones from our motorcycle trip through Turkey in October, 2019 in the days before our lives were forever altered by COVID. The Turkey pictures are really interesting because Turkey is such an interesting country. Between the exotic streets of Istanbul and the Grand Bazaar and Blue Mosque, not to mention the Hagia Sofia, the ruins of Troy and Ephesus as well as the array of Caravansarai, are al eclipsed by the wonders of Cappadocia. It was there among the hoodoos that we did what all visitors to this strange place do early in the morning, we took a hot air balloon ride in the crisp morning air. We were one of perhaps 300-400 balloons that went up that morning and the digital picture-taking opportunity was amazing for several reasons. To begin with, early morning light is the best time to take pictures, as we all know. Then, the totally unique landscape combined with the colorful balloons at all stages of inflation, launching, floating and landing was an awe-inspiring sight for a good several hours.
One of the pictures I took that morning from the balloon basket, where about ten of us were lodged for the ride, was of a gaggle of balloons that were getting ready to launch but not yet fully inflated. It’s an unusual photograph in composition because its an aerial shot taken downward, so not a normal perspective one sees every day. And these three balloons that are on the ground and preparing for their morning ride into the atmosphere, sit on this otherwise barren landscape like big amorphous blobs that are very colorful (all three are very differently colored and adorned, so as to create a rather random pattern of shapes and colors). It’s a great picture because when you see it, it gives you pause and makes you look at long enough to figure out exactly what it is and what’s going on with these blobs. It all gels in your mind fairly quickly and you tend to smile to yourself with the realization that you are looking at something that is fun and whimsical and used for no other reason than to elevate the spirits of its riders as they spend forty-five minutes or so floating above the desert-like landscape with its strange Middle Eastern natural rock formations.
If I were ever to be asked to submit a picture for a photographic award, i might well choose that picture because it is so unique and blends the modern colors of the balloons with the harsh granularity of the Turkish desert, where caravans of camels once passed on their way to the Silk Road and the riches of the Orient that lays beyond the horizon. Those deflated balloons speak to me for one reason or another in the few seconds that they appear on the digital frame screen. Then the faces of my smiling granddaughters swimming in the pool in Ithaca pops up and my mind is instantly transported back through the centuries and the miles from the camel caravan to the reality of wondering where they will swim next summer as we sort out the next chapter of family life in our changing times.