Recently I listened to a Revisionist History Podcast with Malcolm Gladwell titled “Free Brian Williams”. While the podcast starts off describing the moment in 2013 when David Letterman asked Brian Williams about the helicopter convoy he was on in Iraq ten years earlier. During his answer, he claimed that he was on a helicopter that was shot down….but it turns out, he was actually on a different helicopter that arrived on the scene of the ambush an hour later.
This lead to him eventually being fired from the host of NBC Nightly News and he was excoriated in the media for lying. However, Gladwell’s point in using this as an
We are memory fundamentalists. We think our memory is a camera recording our
Memory is fallible. Mutable. Imperfect.
It’s why I take photos and make photo books. Not to capture every single detail; but to capture the essence of my life, year after year.
I take photos to help me remember a moment and while I’m not always successful, I attempt to take photos that remind me of not just what is happening but the emotion surrounding the event.
When I look at photos months or years later, I want to remember the moment and what it felt like to experience it.
And the only way I look back at old photos is through my photo books.
I can’t remember the last time I went back into my photo archives. Due to the sheer number of photos I take, this usually involves an effort to pull out the hard drive, load the digital catalog and sift through the thousands of photos I took that year.
But a photo book transports me immediately.
I just pull the year I want from the shelf, open it up and remember what life was like that year. It’s a collection of my favorite photos, creativity arranged to reflect my artistic voice – similar to my photographic vision.
Take this example a month before my youngest daughter was born.
I don’t have to rely on my memory because it is documented in my photo book. When I was nine months pregnant with my daughter, we were preparing for my son to be a big brother. One day we asked him when his little sister was going to get here and he said she was stuck in mommy – because we were reading the picture book, My Truck is Stuck, a lot. It was one of those classic family stories that have been memorialized in a photo book.
Everything about this layout is specific and intentional. Where I placed the photo, the amount of negative space I included, and the font style, size, and color. All of these small decisions led to a cohesive, sophisticated photo book.
A
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