Photography and Its Significance In Our Life

This journal entry is simply a random musing of an article I had to read for class.. It's called "Susan Sontag On Photography", and a certain section of the article really popped out at me...

 We put more meaning to photographs than we realize, sometimes.. Yeah, we can take as many photos as we want, but there is a certain attachment to certain photographs... For instance, to lose or tear up a picture of a loved one can be considered a great loss (especially if they are dead or far away), or maybe it signifies the end of a relationship. That one and only photograph of your great great grandfather may be very important to your grandmother (or something), because it's the only photo of him that she has.... I can think of 3 examples of a photograph (or a group of photos) having significance to me in some way.

The first instance is my parents' wedding album (which no longer exists). My parents had a huge fight one day and my mom ripped apart their wedding album. I remember going into my dad's office afterwards to collect all the pieces into a white trash bag, hoping to somehow restore the album (by taping it together or something.. it would've been a very hard project though). I had an attachment to those photographs because I guess it symbolized a time where my parents' publicly announced their love (for a lack of a better term..), and the ripping apart of that album was a sign that it was falling apart. (I do still have one or two pictures from that album. Though my dad is ripped out in one of the pictures).

The second instance is the only photograph of my grandmother when she was young (the other pictures we have were of her later years). She lived in a country and a time where photography was usually only for the rich (Azores, Portugual), so to have this picture was awesome. Unfortunately, we lost it in the fire, and I'm sure it was a big loss to my mom.. (Even I felt the loss).

The third instance was my only picture of my older brother, Jonathan (he died a few hours after he was born). When I first found that picture, I was kinda shocked and surprised, because I never knew that a photo of him existed. Sadly, I also lost this photograph in the house fire. 

Speaking of the fire, there is another photograph instance involved in that.. We were able to salvage some stuff from our house afterwards, one of them being a broken firebox filled with old documents and photographs. One day I decided to look through it, and I found an envelope filled with photographs that were water damaged. They were still wet and the ink on the photographs were really messed up, making these cool patterns.. I decided to make a collage out of the photos (You can find it here.. I hope to take a better picture of it someday.       The initial meaning of these photographs were lost in the fire, but now they have a new meaning.. I look at this collage of photos and it reminds me what was lost, but there will always be pieces that we can remember (or something).


Anyways, are there any special photographs that have a significant meaning to you and/or someone you know? (I keep thinking of more examples, but most of them are sad so I'd rather now mention them ;_; ). I never really thought of the impact that photographs can have on us personally, especially when people we know are involved, ya know?..