It's the difference between trying to get a photograph you can print and hang on your wall, and just taking a snapshot with a smartphone, like - this is Bob and me in front of Niaagra Falls. Just little mementos of something.
When, as a family, we sit down and work our way through the old tins and cardboard boxes of prints from way back when, it's the snaps and arch formal family portraits that mean the most. By far the most important contribution that photography makes to our real lives is the mementoes that it provides of times that would otherwise be forgotten or just never known.
The faded print of my great grandfather and grandmother (people that died decades before I was born) standing old and crooked but clearly proud at the porch of their Welsh cottage resonates incredibly with me. As does the wedding print full of their children (there were eleven that lived), each perfectly presented, who grew up to be the (many) great aunts and uncles that I just about remember from when I was six or seven years old ... with my own grandfather amongst them (fresh-faced and fifteen) just two years before he volunteered for the army and fought at Ypres/Passchendaele (and almost died from the gassing).
I love 'serious' photography. But the family snaps are more important.
And we should print our snaps ... or we won't have the biscuit tins and badly arranged albums to work through forty or fifty years on.
