I Wish I Could Give You This Feeling
On the Corners: Photos from a Decade Ago
When I look through old photo albums at my parents’ home, I always notice that the older albums, from Cali and Hawai’i, have photos with rounded corners. Halfway through the Hawai’i albums, around 1985, something dramatic happened. Not to our family, although I’m sure many things happened with repercussions felt today (more on that later), but to the photographs. Up until I started kindergarten, the photos had rounded corners, and were matte finish. From that point onward, the soft rounded corners were gone, replaced by corners sharp enough to leave a scratch.
Round corners, old. Sharp corners, new. To this day, that correlation still lives in my brain. But I suspect it’s outdated, and it’s also being undone. We may have touch screens and the internet to thank for it. Windows and buttons with rounded corners, long seen in Apple design, have become the default look in x-amount of interfaces. I don’t know bout you, but I trust sharp-cornered app design far less.
Anyway, there were also hella blurry photos in the albums too. I’m glad moms and pops left them in because they’re real like that. I’ve written before about my newfound appreciation for the “bad” shots I’ve taken, but with these round corners, watch out! Blurry and underexposed is how everything feels rn. The combination of the film texture, the blur, and rounded corners evokes something in me. Being old when everything old is new again and everything new is old is not so bad.
Fun fact: Marshawn Lynch is in one of these photos.
