The importance of photos and why they matter
The importance of photos becomes more obvious the older you get. We send a thousand images across the world in seconds, and our phones stay crammed with photo after photo we will probably never look at again.
But there is something almost magical about taking a digital file and turning it into something you can hold, whether that is a print from the high street or from a professional lab.
In my opinion, images are meant to become photographs. Something that can be held, turned over in the pages of an album, and shared with the people you love. There is nothing wrong with a photo living on a phone, but for an image to actually move someone, to provoke a reaction, sometimes even a tear, nothing beats a beautifully printed photograph. It has longevity. It can become the foundation of a family’s history. To someone, that photograph can mean the world.
I see it every time I give my mother photos of her granddaughter. I see it every time my wife flicks through an album of our dog Elsa as a puppy.
On a trip to visit my parents in northern Spain, I was handed an old proof album. Red cardboard cover, bound with what looked like curtain cord. I had not seen it in decades, but the second I opened it, it all came back: a black and white, hand printed portrait of me at four years old. I remembered the sitting. I remembered the two lovely women who photographed me in their studio in Cambridge, and I remembered every toy they let me play with while they worked. That album is one of my mother’s most treasured possessions. She understood the importance of photos long before I did.
When a bride asks me about albums, I always encourage her to get one. I know weddings are expensive, and an album can feel like one more cost after a day that already cost a fortune. Of course you get the digital files too, resized so you can share them wherever you like. But an album is something else. It will outlast the bouquet and the cake.
It is your day, recorded and presented so that opening it brings back exactly what you felt when it happened. It is something you can hand to the people you love, something tangible, that to some of them will mean the world. A photograph on a screen gets scrolled past. A photograph in an album gets picked up again, years later, by someone who was not even born yet.
So do not leave your wedding photos sitting in a folder on a cluttered desktop. Choose the ones that mean something, and have them printed. I promise, it will mean the world to someone.
This post is dedicated to Ramsey & Muspratt of Post Office Terrace, Cambridge, the two photographers who took the portraits that still bring my mother joy, decades on. Money very well spent. Thank you, wherever you are. You are the reason I understand the importance of photos.
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