Print our Memories
/I would like to tell you a sad story.
A story about why I believe it is important that we print our memories.
In 2011 I attended my cousins wedding and during the reception I made portraits of all my family members.
In the spring of 2012 my uncle died suddenly.
It was a devastating loss for my family. He was all our favorite.
My way of coping with the grief was to lay on my bedroom floor and surround myself with photo albums from my childhood.
Within those album pages I could hear his delightful giggle and experience memories again of him. In my search for images for his memorial I found those portraits from 2011 stored away on an eternal drive I no longer used. I printed and framed that portrait as a gift to my Aunt. You can imagine the emotional reaction it received. Even though I had emailed her a digital copy years ago, she had never gotten around to making prints of it. That framed portrait was displayed lovingly on his memorial table.
There is concern in the scientific community that this generation will be a black hole as we rely so heavily on digital documentation. I am grateful that I grew up in the analog generation and that I have these printed memories of my childhood and albums filled with friends and adventures from my 20's and 30's.
DVDs are becoming a thing of the past as technology advances. Jpeg files are corruptible and 22% of hard drives fail after 4 years. It isn’t a question of if; it’s a question of WHEN. It happened to my brother and we will never get those first photos of my nephew back. It has happened to me many times. Thankfully, I have numerous backups of all my images. Even still, I have been working on a massive project the past year printing and filling albums with my favorite images since I started shooting digital in 2006.
I feel that I am doing my clients a disservice by only delivering digital images to them because I know that it is possible that they will never be viewed again and could potentially vanish. That is why I offer my Fine Art for Families. I want their memories to last and their children's children to enjoy them.
People need to know where they came from. They need a sense of lineage.
Please print your memories. Get those images off your phone before you delete them to make more room.
Print them. Make albums. Start today.
“Because 50 years from now the most photographed generation in history will have no photos.”
