Last night I had the opportunity to listen to a 35-year veteran photographer tell stories. All of them were interesting and enlightening, but he left us with this one:
"I used to wonder if what I did for a living was really worthwhile. Was I making a valuable contribution? Was I making a difference in people's lives? As a commercial photographer, I worked with a lot of doctors who save lives every day, architects who create landmark buildings, college educators and others who would leave me feeling pretty small by comparison.
One evening as I took the trash out to the dumpster behind my studio, I found a woman's wallet lying in the alley. I picked it up and found the owner's driver's license inside. She lived only a few blocks from the studio so I walked to her house, knocked on the door and handed it back to her.
She opened the wallet and looked inside. She didn't look for her cash, she didn't look for her credit cards. She pryed open a small compartment, looked up at me and asked, "Now why would they take that?"
She went on to explain that she had kept a portrait of her late husband in that compartment, and it was gone. She began to cry as she told me about the man she was married to for many years, the missing portrait, and why it meant so much to her. She was devastated."
Cash has limited value, and credit cards can be replaced. But memories are priceless, and so are the photographs that preserve those memories. As the people who create those photographs, we often go unappreciated. Our clients, and our family and friends for that matter, rarely grasp the true value of the images we create until many years later.
And as we get bogged down with the mundane tasks of running a photography business or obsess about our equipment, our technique, our "artistic vision" or a hundred other things that clients never notice, we also can fail to recognize the true value of what we produce, or comprehend the impact on people's lives.
..things are not always what they initially seem...
