Journal, Diary, Photos or Gallery? Four Ways We Try to Remember a Life
Journal, Diary, Photos or Gallery? Four Ways We Try to Remember a Life There are more ways to record a life than ever before. We take photographs constantly, write notes to ourselves, keep diaries, save screenshots, create albums, and scroll backwards through years of images looking for something we vaguely remember. Yet the tools we use tend to separate these things. Photos live in one place. Writing lives somewhere else. A diary becomes a chronological stream, while a gallery becomes a collection of images without much explanation of why they mattered. Perhaps the problem is not that we need another way to store things. It is that the different ways we remember — through words, pictures, stories and periods of our lives — belong together. A journal is about what was worth keeping The word journal can suggest a daily practice: sit down, open a page and write about the day. But a journal does not have to become another habit to maintain. ...