Over the past couple weeks my family has been preparing for my grandmother’s passing. She was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago (ironically, she’s never smoked) and six months ago she decided to stop chemotherapy, which didn’t seem to be working for her. Over the past two weeks she’s been growing progressively weaker.
We’ve had a lot of time to prepare for this, and my family is handling it very well.
One of the things my mother and I have been doing in preparation for my grandma’s memorial service is sifting through stacks and stacks of family photo albums, scanning pictures and putting them together into a slideshow. I can’t believe how well documented my grandma’s life is. We even have her footprints from the hospital in which she was born.
My grandma in 1936
We have looked at hundreds of old photos. Some are of my mom and her siblings long before I was born. Some are of my grandparents as children. There are even some of my great-grandparents when they were my age…or younger, even. There are entire lifetimes condensed into books with scribbled ink captions and disintegrating paper pages. In many cases, the photos are the only thing we have left of many of the people within them, who are now long gone.
My grandparents on their wedding day, 1951
I know a lot of professional photographers who like to call family and wedding photographs “investments,” but it’s shockingly difficult to convince other people that they really are investments. It’s easy for someone to comprehend “investment” when you talk about money because money doesn’t just have value, it is value. But is it as valuable as a picture that helps you remember something, or someone that you always want to remember?
Grandma with me, 1985
A 70-year-old photograph doesn’t have the same kind of numerical value that money has, and that’s why it’s so hard for some people to grasp why a photograph is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than money. Photographs are emotional investments. Money cannot buy how you feel when you review a photograph of a time you no longer remember, or of a face you no longer remember, or a face you never knew at all.
Money. Cannot. Buy that.
The mystery I encounter time and time again as a wedding photographer is why people don’t want to spend money on something that will eventually hold more value than money. Is it just too hard to imagine a time when your parents are gone? Or your spouse? Will you wish you had more photos of them? Better photos of them? Photos that captured their personality to better help you remember them?
My grandparents with their five children, respective spouses, and eleven grandchildren last Thanksgiving (2007)
Someday, somebody will be looking over photographs of me. They will say,
“Look how young she is in this picture. Look how skinny she was back then. She looks just like you in this photo. This picture captured her personality, she looks like she would have been a fun person to know.”
Now that’s value.
August 15 | 12:49AM
EDITED TO ADD:
I’d like to insert a comment I received on this subject from MySpacer Noelle
“This is something that I can relate to in so many ways. I grew up living with my great grandfather, and the day he died I scrambled through my heaps of photos wishing I had more of him (as I tear up just typing this). I would put a higher price on just one more photo of him then I would so many other things.
Also, my house burnt down back in 2003, the house I had lived in since i was in about 4th or 5th grade. And honestly the first thing I thought when they told me was, “Oh my God, all my photos of friends and family!” I was so devastated. It was the only thing I cared about—everything else could be replaced, it was just stuff, but those memories were something I was never going to get back, not in that form. So what if they were just crappy disposable camera photos, they were mine, my high school memories. I have a great family and a bunch of them actually ended up sifting through the rubble that was my bedroom and they took and cleaned and hang-dried hundreds of photos because they knew how important it was to me.
It was probably one of the best things anyone has ever done for me.”
