Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past

An intriguing, entertaining page-turner; inspires me to resurrect this valuable ritual!

I enjoyed this "photo album" so immensely I immediately sent a digital gift of it to my mother. It's so incredibly human, proving that our emotions, struggles, joys, sorrows, and laughs are timeless, bonds that reach across decades, even centuries, to tie us together in the experience of life. Ransom Riggs is a rare historian capturing this fragile record of our collective memories, and I applaud his dedication to keeping this rapidly vanishing resource alive. TALKING PICTURES goes from hilarious to heartbreaking and back again, plus everthything in between. It's as fun to flip through as a family album - only more poignant and irreverent. These resurrected bits of rubbish depict *real* people, are real photos, snapped with purpose, only to become a swirling pile leaves fallen from the family tree, caught on the winds of change and swept up, rescued, and collected by Riggs and his fellow enthusiasts. I know my own grandparents were guilty of the very crime of tossing out photographs when they moved across the country in '69. I wish I wish they hadn't done that. I'm going to start turning my digital photographs into real physical prints, and writing on them, too. Riggs is right: this is too important to our history to leave to computers, files, memory cards, flash drives, and Facebook! I'll be giving a copy of this book to many people on my list this Holiday season. It's so entertaining and enchanting I want to share it with everyone I know. Read more