The Cost of a Memory

I answered my phone the other day, to the sound of my dad's voice.  He told me my uncle Glen had passed away.  There is always a moment of disbelief when news like that is bestowed upon us.  But reality isn't far behind.  His passing made me think of the last time I spoke to him and how during the family gathering we opted not to have someone photographing the event.  Now, more than ever, I regret the decision.  We cannot see into the future, but through photography we can keep a part of the past with us.   Or can we?

Before we started photographing others, we used to love photographing family and loved ones.  We have albums of prints to view anytime we want.  But then the digital age arrived.  We traded film for memory cards and prints for CDs.  It seemed like the right payoff, until we started to realize the life of the average CD is about 3 years.  Suddenly, family photographs are no longer viewable.  Lost to a digital black hole, all the family vacations and special moments we can no longer get back.  The fear of losing such wonderful moments was one of the biggest reasons we moved away from the CD movement and returned to the print process. 

Sure, the digital age has made it easier to capture special moments and preserve them for a lifetime.  Yet, we insist on viewing digital images digitally.   It's wonderful that we can store gigabytes of family photos on writable CDs and DVDs, but how often do we get to enjoy them?  One caveat of the digital age is the fact you need a device to view images.  As photographers we hear the days of print are dead.  It's easier to give a client a CD of images and be done with the process.  But the process isn't done. 

Enter Chase Jarvis, a huge voice in modern photography.  He was recently asked about prints versus digital viewing.  His response was simple:  "The print is the actualization of a process".  The print is a physical reminder.  It's tangible.  It doesn't need batteries, recharging, or WiFi to enjoy.   So why do we insist on cheapening the experience?  If we know the average life of a writable CD or DVD is 3 years before the information starts to become unreadable, will you remember to burn discs every couple of years or will you fall victim to lost memories?

We don't expect clients to buy every photograph we make.  It's our hope they will find unique memories they want to display and eventually tuck away for future viewing.  If you are old enough to remember the glory days of 35mm film, you are also old enough to know how spent film canisters sat in a drawer until they were no longer printable.   

If you take the average price of a print and divide it by 40 years,  you end up realizing a memory isn't really that expensive.   At the end of the day, will it be the initial investment that scares us, or will it be the memories we lost because we didn't place enough value on our memories.