I was thinking about a photo of my dad the other day. It was a photo of him at a train station in the 1960s.
It wasn't a great photo as I recall. It was dark, black and white and kind of blurry, but it was exceptionally meaningful to me.
That crappy pic was all I had of him when he was gone to Ottawa for a job interview that would ultimately uproot my family from the land of living skies and replant us in the nation's capital.
I was only about five or six years old at the time and it was the first time in my life we had ever been separated. I looked at that picture constantly while he was gone. Even thinking about it 55 years later brings back the deep melancholy his absence evoked in me.
Although kind of crappy, that photograph was a very intentional thing. First of all, not everyone had a camera handy at all times and film was expensive. I don't know who took the picture or what the context was, but somebody felt it was a moment worth capturing.
They wouldn't have known for sure whether it would even turn out and yet it was probably the only one they snapped. They had to then, possibly days, weeks or months later, take the film in to be developed. They could not have known how much it might come to mean for a small boy missing his father.
When I started writing this, I had it in mind to lament how unintentional and meaningless our photographs have become in the digital era.
I don't have any idea how many pictures I have on my phone right now, but it has to be thousands. If I were to cull them, which I am avoiding because it's just too overwhelming a prospect, how many would I keep? Maybe a handful. Ultimately, I might just say screw it and delete them all, that's how much they mean to me.
I am, however, getting much more circumspect with my snapping and posting, trying to be more intentional, trying to live in rather than catch the moment.
Because I also take pictures for a living, I have a bunch of SD cards kicking around with thousands more photos on them, most of which never even get looked at much less used for any meaningful purpose, nor will they ever be, likely. "Archiving" has become more like hoarding.
I don't know if there is any point in lamenting it, but technology has killed the value of the vast majority of photographs. Billions get taken and posted instantly to social media every day.
I want to think positively and consider that maybe the vast volume of meaningless pictures gives the great, intentional ones, taken by people who know what they are doing, even more value.
Coincidentally, as I was writing, another in our friend Phil Cornwall's series of portraits popped up on my Facebook feed. I took some time to appreciate it, the way he captures in a pose something that appears not to be a pose at all, the masterful use of light, the saturation of tone and colour.
It's art, what he does, and all too often I fail to see it because of the constant visual overload of pics probably best not snapped at all.
