Portrait Photography as History

A project I’m working on is to scan family photographs dating back to the 19th century, although most are from the 1940s to 1960s. It has reminded me of something I’ve longed believed – that photographers don’t just create images for those in the present day, they also create documents that will eventually be seen as meaningful history – and the better the photography, the more meaningful it becomes.

We’re fortunate to live in an era of plentiful photography, although it’s often a concern of mine how many of these digital photos we take today will eventually be lost forever. Hard drives fail, or are never backed up, and images that only reside on a computer can easily be forgotten.

While I back up my own photography on multiple drives, I doubt many amateur or home photographers save their digital photos with as much care. Printed photos are expensive and difficult as well as spacious to maintain, but I wonder what the chances are of a printed photo lasting more than 50 years from now as compared to the same photo only saved on a computer.

Photos can be shared on internet sites like Facebook and can be accessed at any point – but who is to say Facebook or another similar social site will still be around in 50 years?

On the other hand, often times a print can be the only copy of that image in existence, and as families expand with time, that print might only be known to a few people. Scanning and sharing old photographs can expand that circle.

Most people remember their grandparents, but that knowledge rarely extends to great grandparents and beyond, and the memories of each person’s ancestors are only of the age they knew them. Photography, and to a much more limited way, painting and drawing, are the only ways for our knowledge to extend past our own memories. These points in time are lost forever if they are not saved.

The above photo is likely a high school yearbook photo of my grandmother on my mother’s side. It was taken in the tiny town of Athens, Louisiana in the 1920s. I’m super impressed with the quality of the portrait – Athens really can’t be any smaller a town, and the photographer did an excellent job capturing her youth. I always knew her as a very kind, yet sometimes stern, elderly lady.

Here is my grandfather on my father’s side during WWII. He served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under General Patton in Europe. He never talked about the war to me, and unfortunately only lived into my teens, but there is so much I can read into the photo:

He later became his family’s photographer, and he really was quite good at it. I have many excellent slide photos of my dad and his brother as they grew up in Texas, and of my grandmother. Here is a photo of my dad and my grandmother from the 1940s. I really like the composition, lighting, and atmosphere of the image:

If you get the chance, work to save your own family’s history – and that includes photos of yourself! You never know how much it might mean to someone who lives after you, generations from now.