Sunday, March 20, 2011

Why do we photograph?

Hello all!

In case you were looking for my portfolio gallery, since this is a blog, you'll have to backtrack to the first post.  Which in this case, is the post before this one.  So, if you don't want to read this part and just see the pictures, you can skip back in time to the first post now - I won't be offended, really ;)

Had a pretty crazy week this week.  Last Saturday I ended up injuring my heel walking around the job, and by Monday, I couldn't walk at all.  Since my current occupation requires me to be moving around and usually walking at least two miles a day, the doctor told me to lay off for at least five days while I waited for the drugs to take their course.  So I was off work, but pretty useless because I couldn't really do anything anyway.  But this was also a rare week in that mom notified me a family member had passed away, and the funeral would be the day before I got to celebrate a friend's wedding.  It's sorta' been an emotional rollercoaster especially since I'm just sitting at home, doing nothing but thinking about stuff!

Anyway, I got to thinking about doing more photography as soon as my foot healed up and I actually thought about why I do photography.  In the beginning it was this cool hobby activity I did that enabled me to buy all kinds of cool photo equipment and solve photographic problems in the field....being able to properly expose my model for the ultimate expression of their beauty...blah blah blah blah blah blah....

But after mom called and gave me the news one of our older cousins had passed on, making him, me, my brother and sister the 'alpha cousins', since there are alot of second, third, and fourth cousins now from this huge family (my dad was one of three, and my mom was one of NINE, crazy),  I thought about all the family photos my parents have at their house and literally all this week I thought about alot of those images, snapshots, of a time long gone.  One image my mom especially likes is this one:


That's me on dad's lap when I was almost a year old.  This shot was taken 44 years ago.  My mom probably took it with an old instamatic using the ancient 126 format that was popular at the time.  I bet it even had a flashcube!  Not a great shot when you consider what I do to make a simple portrait these days.  But the shot has meaning, to mom and dad for sure.  To me even moreso after having gotten through this week of loss.  This was taken before I knew there was a whole 'nother world outside the boundaries of our old house in La Puente, California.  When cartoons were the thing to watch and anything with actual humans on tv was boring.  Having been a professional drummer, this was before I even knew what drums were, let alone thinking about playing music.  Cameras and photography?  Forget it!

I'm sure I'm not the first person to come to this epiphany that photographs record moments in time.  And I'm sure many people have already done their versions of "before and after" pictures.  But I got a chance to meet a man who never had that chance.  He has a picture, not unlike the one of us and dad, but that's all he has because his dad past away two weeks after the shot was taken.  Imagine that.  All these years having gone by and only now I think about all the images I didn't make.  I look back on my life and I see decades having gone by now.  And there aren't alot of meaningful pictures like the one above.  Sure, lots of portraits made of other people in the last decade, but hardly any of my family and the extended family I grew up with.

So I'm about to change all of that.  None of us are getting any younger and the evidence of that was apparent today at my cousins' funeral.  I drove the hour or so by myself to get there and cursed through the traffic on four freeways the whole time.  But when I got there it was like I was reminded why I came, and I got to feel like I was twelve all over again because although there are less of our elders, there's still enough of them that it quite literally made up a pretty big Hawaiian luau after the service. 

And the funnier thing was, since I had the biggest camera there, I was suddenly tasked to shoot all these pictures since it was a reunion of sorts (that's kind of a back-handed insult, eh?  "You have a big camera - your photos must be awesome!").  I protested that a funeral shouldn't be the reason we all see each other again after such a long absence, and I promised all my cousins that we will get together again under happier circumstances.  So there I was, just a camera with a 50mm lens, no flashes of any kind, and I got this shot, for mom and dad:

(and no, I don't have the EXIF data, and no, I don't care ;)