Why Do We Create Portraits
Portraits of objects such as cars, tires, food and thousands of other items are often called commercial photography. And although they may be images that bombard us in ads on TV, magazines and the internet, they are portraits of objects. But the images we really think about when we talk about portraits are usually the pictures of family and friends, the people we know, the people we love.
Those Special Moments
We often take photos of ourselves and family at important moments in our lives. The special birthday celebration, the once in a lifetime trip, the holiday gathering. All of these are to remember. These images provide a history of family and friends, they get saved and looked at, often for years and years to come. With photography now being somewhere between 150 and 200 years old, photographs provide a connection to the past. We see distant relatives and long lost friends in those special moments. We hear the stories from those that are still present, or the stories that have been passed on through the filters of friends, relatives and generations.
Photos Are Like An Eternal Dream
Holding photos in your hands, even ones that were recently taken, is almost like having a waking dream. The portrait has the potential of telling many stories. That image of you and your family on that great trip has at least as many stories as the number of people in the photo. As the stories get told they overlap, overlay, modify and change to a better story about the same shared experience.
Before-Our-Time
Photographs “before our time” are often fascinating to look at. I’ve seen photos of my grandparents vacationing in Lavallette, New Jersey as early as the late 1930’s. Having spent many summers there, I am very familiar with present day Lavallette. Looking at some of those photographs, there are vague visual reminders of the town from that earlier period that exist today. Those black and white images, often torn, stained, and faded with age creates a dream like view of the past.
Long gone grandparents in their prime, distant family that have long been forgotten, and their friends that will go forever unidentified all populate these photos. All of them told stories about these days on the beach. All of them had their stories overlap, overlay, modify and change to a better story. Now, like the people in the photos, those stories are all gone.
What’s left to us is the remembrance of the people we’ve known and the people we’ve loved. These portraits become vessels of told and untold stories, they become our memories, they become our personal eternal dreams.
