Evoking the past

[carl_valiquet]

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« I’m trying to make sense of all of this».

Says my friend Frederic, aged 94, as he is looking through 

his transparencies of his past.

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[stuny]

Lovely

[carl_valiquet]

5 hours ago, stuny said:

Lovely

Thank you Stuny. I took this photo of Fred at his house in Montreal just before returning back to Java. It was a sad moment, as we both knew that is was the last time we saw each other.

[fotografr]

That is sad, indeed. What will happen with his images? 

[carl_valiquet]

5 hours ago, fotografr said:

That is sad, indeed. What will happen with his images? 

Hello Brent. Fred will scan the images and most probably his daughter will keep the digital files and slides. 

But, I like Fred, wonder why we photograph?

[fotografr]

11 hours ago, carl_valiquet said:

Hello Brent. Fred will scan the images and most probably his daughter will keep the digital files and slides. 

But, I like Fred, wonder why we photograph?

I've been going through that same process. I had thousands of slides and negs in my files and started going through them a couple of years ago. In doing so, the question I keep asking is, "Why keep that?" A huge amount of my work from 50 years of photography has gone into the bin. 

[carl_valiquet]

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On 10/15/2022 at 8:39 PM, fotografr said:

I've been going through that same process. I had thousands of slides and negs in my files and started going through them a couple of years ago. In doing so, the question I keep asking is, "Why keep that?" A huge amount of my work from 50 years of photography has gone into the bin. 

Your question Brent: why keep that? My question: why photograph? Why take photographs? I was a commercial photographer for more than 30 years. I to went through my files. All the commercial work went into the garbage. The rest, the personal work, I kept. Going through the thousands of images, I recall my life, my friends, my family. We photograph to remember and hopefully to leave a bit of ourselves behind, so maybe some people will know ere they come from. Photography is like an addiction. And nothing stops us like HCB, to one day just stop making images. Then maybe, we will see life through our eyes and not via a lens.

[fotografr]

8 minutes ago, carl_valiquet said:

Your question Brent: why keep that? My question: why photograph? Why take photographs? I was a commercial photographer for more than 30 years. I to went through my files. All the commercial work went into the garbage. The rest, the personal work, I kept. Going through the thousands of images, I recall my life, my friends, my family. We photograph to remember and hopefully to leave a bit of ourselves behind, so maybe some people will know ere they come from. Photography is like an addiction. And nothing stops us like HCB, to one day just stop making images. Then maybe, we will see life through our eyes and not via a lens.

My path was like yours. Commercial/editorial photography for over 30 years. The answer to why we did that is easy. It was a skill that enabled us to make a living. The question about why we do personal photography is different. I believe that kind of work satisfies a need many of us have for a creative and artistic expression. My wife used to comment that sometimes I should put down my camera and, as you said, enjoy life through my eyes. My response to that has always been that carrying a camera encourages me to observe my surroundings even more closely, and when I put the camera up to my eye it helps me to isolate and examine what I see in the viewfinder in a way that I might not otherwise do. 

I think this would be an interesting topic to explore in one of the discussion parts of the forum; "Why do we photograph?"