Miscellany, ephemera, and the value in the valueless.

I am surrounded by paper. In photo albums, ziplock bags, folders, boxes, and loose leaf’s.

I am surrounded by time. In print techniques, material choices, the recorded costs, and fashions shift.

It all represents but a portion of the volume of material my grandparents have preserved over the years. Passed to them as their siblings aunts and uncles passed on. Prints of photos my granddad took, the negatives and receipts still in tact alongside them. Bills for boiler services in WW2 my great-grandfather kept out of practicality.

Lives upon lives, stories accidentally told in the incidentally preserved and unintentionally forgotten. Of course this all holds value to me in sentimental terms, but I’m not here to talk about the wealth found in sentimental history. Rather I want to impart on you the broader value found in preserving, pursuing, and picking through ephemera & miscellany.

The staged photos of great great grandparents teach of fashion and print techniques, the holiday snaps on a tour of post war Europe, and the level of care and attention given to their albums binding, highlight the shift in attitudes towards travel and photography. The boiler service receipts offer a window through which we see far more than most photos show. From the pricing in forms of currency we know longer use (ha’pennys and D) to the adverts on the back espousing the value of electric ovens.

They provide such effective context and connection with the past precisely because of their mundanity, they are such a ubiquitous part of our lives we find ourselves easily transported back in time through our common understanding. Even as the bombs dropped in the blitz of London the boiler still needed servicing, and the bills needed paying.

I have little context for a corset, a photo can only inform me of so much depth, but a bill, an advert, these are things that resonate through lived experience. So the way in which they vary from today is all the more stark, and in turn the lessons they can teach all the more apparent.

There’s a business card that simply states my great-uncles name and address, it’s well made, thick card stock, the address in a fine script font. It is inherently familiar, yet feels so oddly empty, like a detail in a movie or video game the developers didn’t think you’d look closely at, yet I keep looking searching for information that isn’t there. It’s a reminder of how easily we become conditioned to recognise patterns and templates, and how those we consider normal or fixed are still shifting and changing, one day to become abnormal themselves.

All this media, this incidental art, all the wonder and lessons in it, the context and appreciation for life we find in the margins, all of it relies on someone caring to hold on to the little moments. Not out of some pursuit of value or duty of dna, but because it is fuel for time machines, it is a way to hold on to the context that slowly drifts away from us with each passing decade.

I’m not saying become a hoarder, you don’t need to save every receipt and bill. But maybe think about those bits and pieces of unimportance, and how actually the mundane, the space around a thing, helps to truly define it. Maybe save a ticket stub or two, even in my life time those have changed and started to fade replaced by our glass wallets. If you find an old magazine pull out parts and perhaps scan it in. See a stack of old paperwork and thumb through a few leaves, see where it leads.

The macro is only made large by the context the minutia gives, the exceptional truly expressed by its difference from the expected. The normalcy lets us know when something’s special.