The Importance of Photography

With the proliferation of digital cameras, and the fact that today’s cell phones often include decent to quite good cameras themselves, it seems that people are taking photos more than ever before.

Add to that websites like facebook and flickr, and those photos are being shown to family, friends, and strangers halfway around the world – sometimes moments after they are shot.

This is quite an amazing leap forward in the world of photography. Never before has it been so easy to capture and share family memories.

Last month, my grandmother passed away at the age of 95. After the funeral, I asked my aunt to let me borrow a stack of about 200 photos of my grandmother’s life. Some of these photos dated back to the early 1930s (unfortunately there were none of her very early life – I suppose my great grandparents held on to those).



I put together a slideshow covering her life from her teenage years through her final months. It was an emotional experience to say the least. It was surreal just to be holding photos from 80 years ago. And to think here I was, scanning them onto my computer, cleaning up creases and smudges from decades ago, uploading them to my slideshow software, Animoto, and outputting a slideshow to high resolution DVD. I’m sure whoever shot those original photos (probably on a brownie box or something) could never have come close to imagining that 80 years later, I would be doing what I just did.



It’s impossible to know what kinds of technologies will exist 80 years from now. But there will be someone, like me, looking for memories of this time in your life. And it makes me glad that these days it’s so easy to take photos to capture history. I do worry just a bit that many of our photos never actually get printed. Again, I don’t know what the future will be like, but I’m pretty sure my MacBook Pro won’t be around in 2090. So I want to make sure that you all are doing something to get hard copies of your photos. Not all of them, but at least the important ones. Print them out at home. Get them printed at Costco. For the really great ones – use a good lab. Or even make books of photos from holidays, vacations, or special events.

As time goes by, memories fade and stories may cease to be told, but our photographs will live on. So keep shooting and keep printing. And keep preserving those memories for generations to come.



See the slideshow here: