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Make and Reclaim Memories With Photos – Becci Manson of TED-X

Smartphones make is easy to snap a picture, to freeze a moment, to make a visual memory. When I walked the Natchez Trace, I took hundreds of photos. Five hours alone on my feet meant lots of boredom. I filled that boredom with point-and-shoot. Boredom can make the best memories.

Smartphones make is easy to snap a picture, to freeze a moment, to make a visual memory. When I walked the Natchez Trace, I took hundreds of photos. Five hours alone on my feet meant lots of boredom. I filled that boredom with point-and-shoot.

Boredom can make the best memories.

Those pictures became a journal. I never took notes, never recorded conversations, never wrote anything beyond a daily post. After five hours of walking, my fingers didn’t work very well. It would sometimes be midnight before the swelling went down enough to type a report for you.

But I could always take pictures.

When I scrolled through them, sounds and scents came back. Voices rang through the landscape. Daily characters paraded across my screen.

I knew those pictures
would never let me forget.

not without my father

becci manson photos

Becci Manson felt the same way about photography. While she used her talent to retouch pictures, to make them perfect, she never understood how that skill could be used in a disaster. She volunteered to work in the wake of Japan’s tsunami because she was young and healthy. Never squeamish, she knew she could remove debris, muck out damaged buildings and dispose of rotten food.

Becci’s experience changed
when someone brought her a photo.

A little girl. More than a hundred years old. Somebody’s great-grandmother, preserved as she once was. Becci gazed into her eyes and knew she could make a difference. She could restore that little girl, make her whole, return that memory to her family intact. Perfect. Complete.

Becci recruited a team of photographic retouchers from all over the world. Together, they reclaimed 135,000 memories, precious connections that would likely be forgotten without a visual marker.

Enjoy Becci’s TED Talk now.

Do you have favorite old photos?
How do you preserve them?

Join the Make a Memory Movement HERE.

Mark your calendars.
Natchez Trace: Tracks in Time.
Available March 15, 2015.

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14 Comments

  1. What a wonderful way to volunteer those talents to help restore memories. Great TED Talk!

    1. Author

      I really loved this one, Nancy. She never planned to do this when she went to Japan but ended up having such a big impact on so many memories.

  2. That line that you quoted? It’s one of my favorites and is tagged in my book. I look at it often. One of my favorite quotes. Thank you for sharing Becci Manson with us, as you have shared the other people. My “friend” list gets longer and longer with each and every person. No dry eye after watching that video. Girl, you constantly amaze me and make me a better person for sharing all of this. Thank you.

    1. Author

      TED is an interesting place to search. I always love it when I find a talk that fits what I’m writing.

  3. Such proof to me that every talent has the potential for a higher calling! Inspiring! I’m the family archivist. I spend so much time documenting events and saving photos for the future. It’s a labor of love…but it is labor. 🙂 This TED Talk provides some fresh perspective. Thank you, Andra.

    1. Author

      I hope this gave you a boost. I have another story. When I was a kid, my next door neighbor’s house burned. The thing they mourned most was losing their photos. They talked about it for years. That history is important to people.

  4. Will watch the TED Talk hoping to pick up some hints about how to go about keeping track of all the photos that I have. Thousands of them– digital and actual. Taken by me & inherited. I am, to put it mildly, scattered when it comes to photos.

    1. Author

      I don’t know how well she helps with that, but I’m sure there are illuminating ideas out there.

  5. A truly lovely story.
    How do you preserve them…there is the rub. If they are not printed…if, like 80%? 90%? 99.9%? of all pictures today, they are just digital and on your…floppy disk? cd? hard drive? the cloud? and not backed up or even if they are backed up and the technology changes (see floppy disk) and leaves the format behind…is there anything left to recover and preserve?

    1. Author

      We save ours in multiple formats (as I’m sure you do, too.) I worry about the same thing. MTM and I have over 20,000 pictures together………I shudder to think of how many you have.

  6. I just ordered Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. I think I have taken a tiny step forward from filters on instagram to really try to understand my obsession with capturing and sharing images.

  7. What a beautiful service to perform for hurting people. I loved that TED Talk. Seeing those photographs restored made tears well up in my eyes. How wonderful that Becci volunteered and helped so many people after such a tragedy.

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