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Responsibility and the Power of Prints

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In a great scene from Spiderman, Uncle Harry turns to his nephew Peter Parker, yet to be become the super hero, and says ” With great power comes great responsibility.” Later , Peter, now Spiderman, learns the depth of that statement.

 
This is my mother, in her youth , right after World War ll in France. 
It is an honest portrait showing a strong beautiful girl standing strong despite all the experiences of World War ll that she endured during the German occupation. Technically, flawed by a cheap camera, it still captured her real self, and does still now,  as an elderly lady, the one I know. It speaks for her in that moment, assured of who she was then and who she would become. It is a time piece.
 
A few years later, in the early 50s, arriving in New York City, a professional photographer discovered her and took these images. While they are technically perfect with all the high grade professionalism and beauty of classic photography, they are someone else that I never knew but only discovered lying in a draw , while in my teens, . I recognized her as my mother, but this was a woman I never knew existed. It was my mother being someone else, a projection of someone other than herself..

Over 75 years ago, this photographer probably had no knowledge of where these   different images of the same person would wind up nor who would view them. Luckily he had knowledge of how to preserve them and these time pieces endured, and hopefully will continue to do so for the future generations of my family.Luckily I knew the first photographer, my dad. The second one unfortunately is lost. I would have loved to have met him today if he was still with us just to talk about the entire series of images he made here. With his forgiveness I am showing his work here with admiration.  

As photographers we are not Spiderman, but like him we also share an awesome responsibility because like him, we wield an awesome power with a responsibility . The power of stopping time and holding it in one place is something that we often don’t think of, each time we push the button.

In this digital era, with devices that become obsolete and ” no longer supported” programs, without prints, what will the future generations see? How will we see what was, who was, and where have we been?

Images are records of time and we as photographers become the timekeeper. Albums, book, portfolios, prints are important and should be paramount in our craft. They are the physical proof of the time we kept for others to see.

#photography”black&whiteprints#photoprints#miamiphotographer

One thought on “Responsibility and the Power of Prints”

  1. Yes to all the above. Imagine if Mathew Brady never walked the battlefields during the Civil War, for another example. Print your Work should be a t-shirt worn by photographers as a reminder to one’s self and others. Already precious moments for a generation have been erased when smartphones are lost for a mirid of reasons. I doubt even the “cloud” will weather the stormy times ahead. Our industry does have a “great responsibility”.

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