Michele Celentano a Canon Explorer of Light joined us on 9/11 for an eye opening presentation.   Each of us remembers September 11, 2001 in our own way. We tell our stories – where we were, who we were with, what we were doing.  Michelle shared her personal connection with September 11^th through a slideshow of photographs she took just months after the towers fell as she toured Ground Zero with her brother-in-law, a NY city firefighter.

Because of those photos, and thousands of others that were recorded that day, our children, our children’s children, and their children, will never forget.

We each have thousands of stories.  We tell these stories in words and pictures.  In fact, in this group, especially in pictures!  But unfortunately, technology…the very thing that allows to take hundreds of photos, and fix them and file them…has also locked these memories away on disks and hard drives. As Michelle pointed out, a digital file is not a  photo.  You can’t hold them, pass them around, frame them, hang them on the wall, pass them on to future generations. Hence the Technology Trap!

My dad was a photographer. He kept every single negative he processed.  (Negatives are sort of like an old-fashioned hard drive.)  I don’t know where those negatives are now.  But I know where the family photos he took are. They are in my home and my brother’s home and my sister’s home.  And they are in my daughter’s home, and my niece’s and nephew’s homes. They are on our walls.  They are in photos albums saved for decades by the people whose weddings he photographed.

If you’re sharing 100’s of photos on FaceBook with your ‘friends’, think about hitting the post office instead of the post button and send 2 or three real paper photos to the people who mean the most to you.  Photos that they can share with their friends face to face.  That they can treasure for a lifetime, not on a timeline.

I took Michelle’s advice to heart. Today I gave my daughter a photo album with more than 200 photos of her life, family, friends, and pets. And I made sure there was room for more so she can start adding the memories she’ll be making from this point forward. When I gave it to her, she went through it – twice.  There were a lot of “I remember this” and “I forgot about that.” She’s never asked to look at a photo I’ve shown her on the computer a second time. I bet she’s already looked at the album a third time by now. I bet she showed it to her friend who was coming over for a visit this afternoon.  And I know she’ll keep it forever.  Thank you, Michelle, for the wonderful reminder of how precious our photos really are when they’re in the right hands.

Sandy Klewicki

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