My pictures are just for fun. I don’t care what happens to them in a year, much less fifty years.

This is a second in a series of 10 posts about the biggest myths in photography.

Number 9. My pictures are just for fun. I don’t care what happens to them in a year, much less fifty years.

Part of my business is restoring old photographs. A common comment I hear is, “I wish my parents (aunt, grandparents, fill in the blank) had taken better care of these pictures. I guess they didn’t know they would be important.”

The best known photographer of the twentieth century was Ansel Adams. He was also a musician. He considered making a photograph the equivalent of writing a song – the composition. (Funny how the same word applies to both music and photography.) The print and its display is then the performance. Both were equally important. His photographs now sell for tens of thousands of dollars largely because he put care and technique into making his photographs.

We may not be Ansel Adams, but we can value photographs for what they are and take care in the making and keeping of them.

The digital age introduces its own challenges of storage and long term use. The important thing to consider is that someday people will be looking at your photos, or not, if you deleted them or lost them when your hard drive crashed, and trying to understand how you lived and what was important to you. Chances are the only record your great grandchildren will have of you is an old photograph or two. I know that because that is the only record I have of some of my great-grandparents.

Almost daily somebody will ask me what will happen to all the photos that are never even downloaded from the camera much less printed in some sort of permanent form. The answer is “nothing.” They will be gone in a few years.

Were they important? Possibly. Only the future will tell us what we should have saved and could have been discarded.

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