Perhaps the universal appeal of old photographs lies in their property of time travel. It is a pleasure we have deeply abandoned ourselves to during the pandemic—suspended in time, seemingly disconnected from the future, maybe even hard-core anti nostalgists like me fear anachronism a little less, sorting unlimited digital and limited physical images of the past, sharing them in wonder.

This business has offered definitive proof of something that is otherwise a matter resentful innuendo—the one person in the family or friends group who is the chief archivist, who seems to have the complete photographic record—but how?