2016, apparently a screen cap from when I was playing Blackbox.

This is on my phone. I will post again tomorrow from my computer.

My phone started freaking out after a recent update and I was just about to go on a trip. So I hurriedly factory reset to get it functional and hoped all automatic backups were good. The critical ones were for sure, but stuff like camera roll I don’t care about as much.

I haven’t even tried to load and check the camera roll backup yet, meaning the oldest photo on my phone is a whopping two weeks old and is of my parking space number at the airport. It’s a grey Camry, just about the most common color and the most common car. Man, I would never find it if I forgot where I parked it.

If we expand “devices” to my laptop and storage drives, the oldest photo is early 1900s. A shot of my great grandmother as a little girl standing outside the sod house she grew up in.

I still want one

2015

Probably this scanned photo of my grandfather in WWII somewhere in France or Germany around 1943-44. He was a calculator for the 8th Armored Division 398th Armored Field Artillery Battalion M-7 tanks.

I won’t post it but it’s a picture of my old roommate with her almost crawling out of bed. Her bedroom is a disaster with old food plates, clothes everywhere, fast food bags, etc. Just a disaster. It wasn’t gross, just very messy. She had just woken up and had been drinking the night prior.

I took a photo of it all from like 45 degrees up and stylized it in an oil painting style. I printed it out in canvas and gave it to her as a gift and titled it, “depression” she loved it and still has it.

Scan of a print photograph from, I want to say 1985? 1986? Something like that. My grandparents cat losing her damn mind because a fly got in the house.

My friend’s dog Greta. She was already an old lady when I took this picture in 2015 and passed a year or two ago.

March 14, 1999.

It appears to be the first photo I took on my Sony Mavica camera - the one you put a floppy disk in.

I think it was in the car park at the back of RetraVision in Bourke, NSW, Australia.

Camera still works.

October 2005 is when I saved this and it has been through many phones.

Impromptu memorial on Las Vegas Blvd less than a week after the shooting in 2017. I was attending a conference that week, which they chose not to reschedule, because ‘we can’t let terrorism win!’

It was an eerie feeling being there so soon after.

I’ve got the entire catalogue from the Royal photographic society 1870-1915 saved left over from my PhD. But the earliest of those are scans-of-sketches-of-photos because they pre-date the technology to easily duplicate photographs.