Photographs and Their Worth
If you don’t think photos are important, just wait until they’re all you have left to remind you of a loved one. I’ve heard something along those lines over the years and these days I know it’s true…not that I’ve ever questioned it. Truth is that, in particular very recently I’ve had to deal with the suffering and loss, and the mourning of loved ones. And while I understand that, as they say, “this is life,” dealing with the loss and pain and mourning is not easy…to say the least. And so I find myself reaching out for old photo albums, leafing through all those images, in a subconscious attempt to find some kind of peace, remembrance, maybe an escape into a journey back in time, to happier days.
Oftentimes photographs are, indeed, all we have left and what we, ourselves, leave behind. And yet, some people treat photographs, photography (and any other creative work for that matter) as an afterthought, as something not really worth paying for and definitely not worth a lot of money. It’s only when they lose someone smiling in a photograph or when they lose the ability to revisit a certain place captured in a photograph that they realize the true value of that particular photograph. It’s only when these images become the only thing to remember someone or something by that they become invaluable.
So, before devaluing a photograph to close to nothing, imagine that that particular photograph is all that’s left of a loved one or of a place that has become out of reach or forever destroyed or for a species now extinct, or…. How valuable would that photograph be then, to you? What would be its worth, then? Just something to think about….
As always, thanks for stopping by.
Alina Oswald 