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Sunday, 10 August 2014

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Life goes on . . .

Perhaps it's another aspect of the persistence of memory.

One of the things that I (and I suspect many of your followers) find particularly remarkable and endearing about your blog is your thin but not leaky boundaries. That is, your willingness to tell us things about your life and your thoughts in ways that usually - though not always - connect with photography, but that always connect with human concerns. When telling my friends about your blog, I say that it's about the only one that engages with the broad culture of photography as a human endeavor. Many thanks for that.

[Wow, what a nice comment. Thanks Victor. --Mike]

At the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, CT, in the auditorium, engraved on the marble wall in large letters is the quote, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

And in this digital age this may be one of the best arguments I have seen for printing those files. Don't let them be forgotten on some old hard drive or disk.

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

As a Missourian who grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River, I love Mark Twain, but I always repeat my father's version.

He was a great (as in skilled) salesman with a huge vocabulary, and no small amount of verbal flair.
He used to say "If you don't give anyone a snow job, you will never have to shovel the snow afterwards".

Last month my wife's younger sister died suddenly and unexpectedly. We had just visited her a few weeks before (she lived in another state). We stayed at her house, and took her with us as we made the rounds visiting other relatives who live in the area. On these visits my wife would always take pictures--"record shots" she calls them. She always expects me to take pictures too. I do so, but grudgingly, as I am looking for "creative" ways to use my camera and generally resent having to take mere "snapshots."
Over the past few days my wife has busied herself sorting, captioning, printing, and mailing these pictures of her sister and family members to various friends and relatives. I truly believe that having and working with these pictures has somewhat eased my wife's feelings of tragic loss. I expect that these pictures will be viewed less and less as the years go by, but there will always be comfort in knowing that they exist.

Pictures are fish hooks for snagging threads of memories you thought you forgot.

Lovely post, Mike.

Dave

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