The opening of Toy Story 3 involves some "home videos" of a younger Andy playing imaginatively with his action figures and dolls. The whole movie is a meditation on putting away childhood things, and what we choose to save. What Andy and his parents don't deal with is what to do with all that home video footage.
I recently reconnected with the family I stayed with in North Carolina the summer after my junior year of college while interning at the local paper. That summer I took a few rolls of pictures because it was all new and different for me. To them, it was just daily life. So when I sent them scans of the photos, I was surprised at how affected they were to see those bygone everyday moments.
The everyday gets much more documentation these days.
When I was a kid, the movie camera only came out a few times a year, if that. Even the occasions for still photos were fairly selective. Holiday cards, birthdays and vacations, school events, the arrival of a new pet or car.
But after the nest emptied, my mom started taking more and more photographs
