I have had this listed as a topic for over the past month now and finally decided to make an attempt to form something. I've written four very personal drafts about one of my best friends since November. I am choosing to not be so specific, but about how scanning photographs of loved ones and people with personal connection who have passed away. As I am scanning and cataloguing images in Adobe Lightroom, a keyword I often find myself typing and assigning to images is “Dead”. It seems a bit crass or cold-hearted to type that next to so many people I was once very close to, but I find it important to be able to quickly reference those who have died in a way that I can’t forget them. There are others that I don’t go a day without forgetting, and every day I see their images so I don’t need to make that distinction.
Rita and Melvin
I rarely make a distinction between my “personal” work and my “art”. Everything is fair game if the image is solid. So far, I have travelled from 2000 to 2016 in my scanning process. I have watched my mother’s parents rapidly age, because I made the point to take a photograph almost every occasion I was with them. I regret not bringing my camera to the hospice where my grandfather spent his final days in 2012, but my grandmother almost seemed to welcome a hospital visit in 2019 while I photographed. For some reason I needed that in the same way I photograph myself so often. This is life.
Grandparents
The hardest part of writing this is also the reason why I feel compelled to today. It has been seven years since I posted a half dozen photographs in the window of Frazier’s on the Avenue, a bar in Hampden, Baltimore. It was the first thing I could think of doing when I found out that one of my closest friends had died. I regretted not having more photographs of him but I would spend more time just sitting with him than photographing. I cherish the unphotographed moments but still wish I had more.
Josh King
Every year more people pass away, and I go through my negatives and tiny prints to see them. I’ll post them somewhere on social media just to look again. It is a way to say that we shared a moment and I remember the talks or the hugs and still have the stories.
Walter “Wolfman” Washington
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