Save those photos of yours for 50 years from now.

It is all too easy to judge a recently taken photo as not good and quickly dispose of it. Reasons for deleting them vary, but one thought that doesn’t occur often enough is what the picture might look like when viewing it ten, twenty or fifty years later. What might look corny one moment could be nostalgic and touching at the other end of time. Of course this could also depend on one’s photographic skills, but all photographs have different meanings to different people and perhaps it’s a good idea to preserve as much as you can. With digital photography, it is all to easy to lose a picture forever, whether it be from a broken hard drive or a deleted folder on your desktop. These are not issues one must consider when dumping photos into a shoe box or a photo album and allowing them to age in the attic or on an office bookshelf.

This all came to mind when listening to the photographic essay by David Gonzalez in the New York Times. Discovering photos after many years is the same as finding a time capsule in the ground, seeing images from a completely different perspective than what was intended when the picture was originally taken.

Read the article and listen to the audio/photo essay at the New York Times: “Faces in the Rubble”

Also recommended is Gonzalez’s essay on the now-bankrupt Kodak.