Photographs
Worth Printing

When my father passed away in 2023, I inherited a small olive-green storage box from the late 1960s. Faux leather, softened with age and filled with life. Inside were hundreds of photographs and film negatives: faces from birthdays, the interiors of homes well lived in, and photographs of my parents through their years of marriage.

It’s the sort of keepsake you open to find one photograph and lose an hour to. You shuffle through the memories, caught somewhere between the faces in your hands and that musty smell that somehow feels like home.

I love this box.

It was one of the silver linings of an otherwise painful experience. Those photographs mean so much to me, and I’m grateful for the era of film, for tangible pictures, and for parents who cared enough to keep them. Years later, I get to hold what they held and spend a little time with the life they saved.

We often think about inheritance in financial terms. But an inheritance of memories is difficult to put a value on. How do you put a price on a feeling? Long after losing someone you love, what is it worth to hold a photograph of them?

I don’t have an answer that fits neatly into words. I just know what it feels like to open that box.

That feeling has a lot to do with why I care about wedding photographs.

When a couple first looks through their pictures, the day is still close. They remember how it felt to get ready, to see each other, to have their people in one place. The photographs give them a chance to take it all in again, including things they might have missed while living it.

But those same photographs have years ahead of them. A picture that feels special today can become important in ways no one could have anticipated. The people in it grow older. Families change. Details that seemed ordinary become the things someone studies most closely.

I think about that when I look at photographs of my parents. They were living their lives when those pictures were taken. Now I’m their son, looking back through the years of their marriage, grateful that these pieces of it are still here.

There’s something remarkable about a photograph’s ability to do that. It holds a moment in place while our relationship to it keeps changing. We can love it immediately and come back to it years later with a deeper understanding of what we’re holding.

That’s what I hope wedding photographs become for the people who receive them. Something they enjoy now, return to throughout their marriage, and eventually pass along to someone who will be grateful they kept them.

Today, we move at a pace that would have been hard to imagine when my parents started filling that box. So much arrives on demand, through a screen and the scroll of a thumb. Even photographs can move past us before we’ve really looked at them.

A box of old prints asks for a little more of our time. We pick one up. Turn it over. Pass it to someone beside us. A face brings a story back, and suddenly we’re having a conversation we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I want to make photographs worth printing. Photographs people want to live with, hold in their hands, and keep for whoever comes after them.

In a world that keeps getting faster, I like the idea that a photograph can be a small speed bump. A reason to slow down, even for a moment, and share in the joy of remembering.

My parents gave me that in an olive-green box. I’m grateful every time I open it.