Feeling nostalgic…
The above photo is of the house I grew up in, on Niagara Street in the Riverside neighborhood in Buffalo, NY. It was made just before the pandemic for my “Driving Home” project. It looks pretty much as it did in my youth, and although I’ve not lived there on over 40 years, memories of those years come flooding back every time I view it.
Standing on the front porch in my Sunday Easter best; pretending to be a fireman, saving the neighborhood with my best friend Johnny who lived 2 doors down (partially seen on the left); playing touch football in the street (partially seen on the right); looking out over the Niagara River and across to Canada from our attic windows (this is another story unto itself..). All these memories as vivid as if they had occurred yesterday.
Such is the power of photography.
While books and entire college courses have been created to explore that power, as I contemplate this image today, I think about the importance of not just creating the work, but of preserving it. It makes little sense to me to create work without some thought as to how one plans to keep it. Or. put another way: I’ve created this image, “now what?”
For me, the artifact has always been the thing. The print, the negative, if you can’t hold it, it ain’t real. 0’s and 1”s are just abstract concepts. You can’t see them, touch them, or feel them. They are only representations of something. Hence the only way to view a digital file is on a screen. And when the screen goes dark, the image is gone.
This is not an attempt to bash digital photography. I use digital capture devices practically every day. I love them. I bought a brand new iphone 13 not because I needed a better phone but because I wanted a better camera.
No, what I’m saying is, it’s not just enough to make the image capture. That’s only the first step. The most important step is to preserve it. After all, when we’re gone, that’s the only tangible part of our collective memory that will remain…