I’m going to wax nostalgic on this Sunday’s Photo/Art Quote because of a quote from Alfred Stiegltiz who was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form.
Think about all the memories that you can relive through old photographs. By old I don’t mean ones that are a month or a year old. I mean the ones from your childhood or some time in your life when things were quite different than they are now. Good times. Or possibly bad times you made it through. Those memories are priceless. And a lot of people from the digital generation are going to miss out on those opportunities to relive the past in the future because we aren’t printing images and other than professional like ourselves people aren’t backing up that digital media often enough – or even at all!
“What is of greatest importance is to hold a moment.” Alfred Stieglitz
Now Stieglitz may not have been referring to holding the moments of memories. It could have been he was thinking of the moment the light was exactly in a certain form. Or an expression was just as needed to tell the story of a person in one photograph. I would like you think of this in saving moments of memories for people, including yourself, for an older age and future generations.
In many ways I believe this means printing images. At the very least it is a reminder to back up our files in multiple ways. And to remind everyone at every chance to remind them to make prints and back up their photo files.
Yours i Creative Photography, Bob
This is my sister Kathleen and myself in the early 80’s working for a bar called Jelly’s in the Caribbean on an Urban Cowboy night…
