Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Photographic regrets

I have various regrets in life--here's one of them.

Growing up we would visit my grandparents who lived in Bozeman, Montana. Big house, cool stuff, cousins, the whole scene. They also had a copy of my favorite book, the Best of Life Magazine's Photographs. This book contained a series of pictures taken by a man of himself and his daughter every year at the beach, from when she was a baby until he passed away, 40-50 years later. The change in both of them, seen together, is remarkably powerful.

Likewise, here's a site displaying photographs a man took of himself and his family every year (on July 17th) for thirty years.

I vowed as a kid I would do the same with my family... well I didn't. Sigh. Sure we have lots of photos, but to have a systematic portrait of the the family changing over time is no longer possible., and it makes me very sad to think about. What a lost treasure.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This strikes me as a) very cool and b) exactly the kind of thing I would think would be cool to do, decide to do it, and then forget to and regret it. Kind of like that scarf I started knitting in 2000, reading the Brothers Karamazov (took me four years), etc...

Brad Wright said...

Hm-m-m-m, maybe it's not too late to start a scarf!