In The End, Our Family Photographs Are Our Most Prized Possessions

There are photo albums in the wardrobe in my parents’ spare room full of 6x4” prints from the eighties and nineties. Some are a bit blurry, some are underexposed and some are clouded in sun flare, but each one is a time machine - my Mum’s smile, my Dad’s full head of hair, my brother’s face on Christmas morning when he opened the Bucky O’Hare toy he’d put at the top of his list!

Over the years I’ve naturally become a bit of a curator of the family photo archive and I’ve spent time sorting through black and white photos of my grandparents’ wedding, retro shots of my Dad in his flares leaning against the bonnet of his beloved baby blue E-Type Jaguar and my own baby portraits taken in a local studio in typical 1980s soft focus.

Last week we lost my Uncle. He and I weren’t especially close, but inevitably when you lose a family member you reflect on the memories you have with that person and I took a bit of time to look back through some family photographs.

I stumbled upon a 1950s portrait of my grandmother with her two eldest children - the happy little boy on the right being my Uncle - and it made me smile to see such a lovely record of them at that stage in their story.

My Nan had married soon after her husband was demobbed from the RAF following the war. She was still feeding her family with ration coupons at this point, but felt it was important to take her two young children to sit for a family photograph.

A wise investment in my book.

Most possessions lose their value with time. Toys break, clothes go out of style and cars depreciate the moment you drive them out of the dealership! A photograph of a loved one only grows more precious with each passing year.

A family portrait is guaranteed to appreciate in value over time.

It’s a funny thing - whatever stage of life we’re in, there’s always a sense that it will last forever. It’s not until we look back at photographs taken just a year before that we realise how quickly things change.

We always assume they’ll be more time to take photographs, but in reality we can’t take that for granted. Good photographs are often overlooked, until they’re all we have left.

Having family portraits taken is an investment not only in beautifully composed, artfully exposed imagery, but in memory itself. It gives you the opportunity to turn fleeting moments into heirloom albums and prints - a tangible record of your lives, your relationships, your story.

And when those memories are captured on film, you’re creating something even more special: a physical archive. One day, your children or grandchildren may find that box of negatives in the attic and there’s something rather romantic about that.

So if you’ve thought about investing in family portraits, but life got busy and you just haven’t got around to it then I urge you to remember…

You’ll never be this version of yourself again. Your babies won’t be babies forever. This season - whatever it looks like - is worth preserving in beautiful photographs.

I don’t have a professional portrait of my Uncle in recent years, but I do have this photograph I took of him in 2021 with my eldest daughter. One day, I’ll show it to her and tell her about him. And so his memory lives on.

RIP Uncle Bill x