How many times have you said to yourself “oh I should have brought a camera”, or maybe “I should really take a photo of this”? My advice – bring the camera, and take the photo. Whatever it is, and however bad it is. The camera can just be your phone, which probably means you have it with you anyway, and the photograph need not be an award winning shot, it need not even be particularly interesting. But whatever it is of, and no matter how good or bad it is, it will be a historical record, a document of that moment in your life. And at some stage in the future, you may be glad of it. Or perhaps even more importantly, someone else may be glad of it. Someone who wasn’t there at the time, for instance. Possibly even someone who hasn’t been born yet.
Someone said to me recently: Imagine if you could look at a wedding album for one set of your great great grandparents. Imagine how fascinating it would be, but also how much of an insight it would give you into the lives of these people you’ve probably never met, but to whom you are forever connected. Imagine how seeing a record of such an event in their lives would help you feel that connection. Even if it wasn’t their wedding album – even if it was just one photograph. Even if it wasn’t a particularly interesting photograph.
I touched on this topic before, in the aftermath of the census last year, after my father had uncovered a photograph of my great great grandfather from the 1860s. But the thought struck me again quite recently in the aftermath of two unfortunate events.
A few weeks ago a bride whose wedding I photographed two years ago emailed me to ask if I might have any more photographs of her grandmother, who had been at her house on the morning of her wedding. At the time of her email, her grandmother was unwell, and sadly she passed away a short time later. It’s probably fair to say that the photographs of her from that day are more important to the bride now than they were two years ago when they were taken.
A week later, the mother of a friend of mine passed away after an illness – I had photographed his wedding too, and obviously his mother features in those photographs. At her funeral a family photograph was brought to the altar as a symbol of her life and the importance of her family.
In between these two events, while attending a seminar on documentary photography, the importance of a photograph, not just to those who were there at the time, but to those who aren’t here yet, was raised as an argument for documentary photography being an important way of capturing a historic record of events in someone’s life. And if you think, for a moment, not of you as the son, or granddaughter, or great great grandchild, but of you as the father, or grandmother or great great grandparent. Now think about how treasured a photographic record of your life and of the life of those around you would be to those generations yet to come.
It is very unusual these days for someone to have a photograph of their great great grandfather – photography was still relatively new and inaccessible to most back in the 1860s. But photography has never been more accessible than it is right now, and photographs are almost taken for granted. So the next time you think to yourself “I should bring a camera”, bring it. And the next time you have phone in your pocket and you think “I should really take a photo of this”, take it. It mightn’t be half as important to you as it will be to those who you’ll never meet.
Post script: As I post this I see that Facebook has revealed that 3,000 photos a second are uploaded to its service. That is not only a crazy statistic, but one enormous archive of photographic history that its users are inadvertently creating. How great would it be if it was accessible and viewable to all for generations to come?
I feel very strongly about this.
When my father -in-law died I realised I had very few photos of him (and even less “good” ones) because he hated having his picture taken. Immediately afterwards I started taking a lot more pictures of family and distant family. I even bought a new lens (yeah, yeah, gear justification) so I could get the photos I wanted of elderly visiting relatives who, in all likelihood, I’ll never see again. “Photograph the people and things that are important to you” became my new mantra. Or, as my wife told her brother, “he’s taking your picture in case you die”. It’s not too far from the truth. My mother-in-law also hates having her photo taken but I do it anyway, usually discretely, but I don’t apologise. I’m not taking the photo for her. I’m taking the photo for my kids to remember her by (my 4yo daughter has even started a scrapbook of 6×4 photos).
By the way, this also goes for “things”: The radar tower at Cork airport was moved a few years ago and I noticed how great the old one looked against a firey sunset or approaching storm. I vowed to come back one day with my camera. The next week they dismantled the radar. Or this tree in Kerry which was blown over in the high winds before Christmas. No one can created that photo now.
I’m being regularly told about photographs I took 30-40 years ago that are still admired and treasured. Ironically the one time I tried to take a family portrait years ago, my mother described the project in not so enthusiastic terms – that I was ‘recording’ the family members before they died.