What are photographs for?
Why should you have someone professionally capture natural photographs of you and your family?
I take photographs that I want my lovely clients to see and enjoy not just now, next week, or next month, not for the likes and comments on Facebook and not for the yearly supply of profile pictures (though these are some great by products), but for them to relive the innocent memories of days gone by. When your teenager goes off to college for good, that’s when I’d want mom and dad to open their albums and look at how little their baby was. When your daughter is getting married, that’s when I’d want dad to open up those family year books from when she was little and dad was her hero (he still is). When your grandson starts talking, that’s when I’d like my clients from 50 years back to open up their family albums and show their grandson all the mischief his dad was up to when he was 2! Your kids, siblings, their kids, and all the grandkids, and friends, and their kids, and their grandkids – when all of them are over at your house for parties and reunions, I want you to open your family albums and to share those precious memories. I want those family albums to be family heirlooms. Preserved for generations.
One of my sister’s and my favourite activity when we are in Puri (our mom’s home town), is to crack open albums back from my mom’s childhood, and pore over those pictures, while our grandmom tells us stories about mom and our uncles and aunts. So many stories told, so many memories relived. My grandmom has a rule that the kids can take scans and photos of the images, but the albums must remain in Puri. They’re anchored in their roots. Every now and then, when someone talks of a funny incident from the 1960s, those albums are opened. The walls in our Puri house are covered with galleries of beautiful family portraits taken over decades. Each time we go to Puri, I look at every single one of the pictures up there before the holiday starts in earnest.
Most people when asked what they would save from a burning house, they say their photos.
It’s because photos preserve our identities, our histories, a piece of us and moments that make up our lives and celebrates us. Something that we want to hold on to and relive over and over again. Photos turn moments into memories.
