The value of a photograph
What is the value of a photograph?
Is it the price of the paper? The frame that holds it? The amount of ink used in the printing process? When I was a film photographer, working in the darkroom, I could calculate how much for the developer, the photo paper, a new bulb for the enlarger. When I worked in a photo lab, there were always discussions about how to bring down the number of waste prints, the prints that needed to be corrected and reprinted for the customer. Digital photography and the iPhone then came to change the whole metric and photographs, in a sense, became free.
While all this might explore and explain the cost of the photographer, it does not, nor cannot, determine the value of a photograph.
A friend of mine died in a motorcycle accident. His impact on his friends and family was far beyond his short time on this earth. As we gathered at his parents house, we all brought pictures that we had and the dinner table became an impromptu gallery. I have always been "the guy with the camera" and it was a comfort to be able to bring so many pictures for people to see and use in the cementing of our memories of our friend. I noticed people would point out to the others pictures they had taken with our friend. These were the pictures they would linger over, occasionally touch and straighten if it had fallen out of alignment with other nearby pictures, and return to after brief conversations with others about their pictures with our friend. I began to look around and while I could point to many pictures I had taken, I could find none with our friend.
After a few moments of a fruitless search, I began to chew my lip. Who would know that we had been friends? Where was the proof? I had never thought this way about a friendship before. Why now were my memories not enough? In earnest, I began to run through experiences and memories in my head, fearful that already they were beginning to fade in the absence of evidence. I closed my eyes and relived the time when my friend had run across the parking lot of our church to bang on the trunk of my car so I would not leave before he invited me to go see a movie with the group. It was only the second time we had spoken to each other and it was exactly four words, said between gulping breaths for air, "you, star wars, come".
the blurry photo
A tap on my shoulder brought me back to the now and I looked at the father of my friend. He smiled as he asked "Did you see the picture of you and Jason? It's blurry but I think you guys were at the mountain." He led me to the other side of table and pointed to a blurry picture of me, my friend, and three more friends standing in the parking lot of a ski resort. The picture was indeed out of focus. I had not made a wise choice when asking a random passerby to take our picture. Still, it did the work it needed to do. My memories gained a solidity, a permanence, they had lacked only moments before. I looked to my friend's father and he smiled. He knew.
In the following days and weeks, whenever we would gather, my camera was a constant companion. For no reason, we would take pictures, mainly in groups, everyone taking a turn behind the lens as well as in front of it. We all had a number in mind. The number of pictures we had found that night, sitting on a dinner table that had become a gallery, a biography.
[djc]