The oldest file in this archive is P1010031.JPG: a school gym floor, shot from a low angle, slightly blurred, on the family's three-megapixel Panasonic in March 2005. I was at a lunchtime pickup game. I do not remember taking it. Judging by the angle, the camera may have taken it itself while I was doing something else.
By every technical standard it is the worst photograph I own. It is also the one I would defend first.
Here is what it holds that no better photograph does: the floor wax. The specific yellow-brown of a gym built in the seventies. The painted lines with the repainted lines slightly off underneath them, like the building's own edit history. The particular light of a Vancouver lunchtime through high wired-glass windows. I can smell this JPEG.
Every family had a folder like this. A hundred photos, five intentional. The unintentional ones turned out to be the archive.
The family computer's photo folder — P1010001 through whatever number the card filled up at — was not curated, and that was its power. Nobody deleted the blurry ones; deleting felt wasteful and the card was big enough. So the folder kept everything: thumbs over lenses, the backs of heads, the gym floor. Twenty years later, the posed birthday photos tell me what we wanted to look like. The accidents tell me what it was actually like.
This whole website is, in some ways, an attempt to rebuild that folder on purpose — which might be a contradiction. You cannot plan an accident. But you can lower the bar for what gets kept, and keep the numbering honest, and resist the urge to delete the blurry ones.
P1010031 stays. First file in, last file out.