Michael Audain - March 1990

Ever since I started taking photographs in 1958 I have been plagued by the concept of storing (archiving) and counting on my erstwhile good memory to locate what I wanted to find.

In the late 80s my eldest daughter Alexandra (Ale) in her neat handwriting began to archive my negatives, slides and photograph using the standard binders that fit my metal 4-drawer filing cabinets. I now have 7 of them. Some of my binders are sometime misfiled because I suffer dyslexia and putting anything in  alphabetical order is a challenge. Note in the Audain file that the label on the folder exhibits my daughter's neat printing while inside the plastic label my awful printing is in evidence. Going into my files can be interesting. In the 90s I  used Ilford plastic coated paper that dried nice and glossy with no fuss. The reason for 8x10 glossies in that past century, before the advent of scanners, the only way blacks would be blacks in magazines and newspapers was with glossies.

This challenge has increased since the advent of shooting with my two Fuji cameras (X-E1 and X-E2). What to do with those minute storage cards? What about identifying the contents of all my flash drives?

I believe that Staples may have solved my conundrum with these small envelopes (why are they called One Coin?). They are big enough that I can write the contents of those storage cards.

Now if I could only print small and neatly!