P3D The Value of Photography

[Marvin Jones <Campfire@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Message text written by INTERNET:photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>I do not know if the intention was to distribute these valuable slides for
free or if the slides were not viewed as having any value.  I suspect the
later.  I would expect that this person's equipment were sold, not given
away to strangers for free.  But the pictures are personal creations.  It
is hard to put a value to those.  Some people definitely think that they do
not have any value, even though they were not family pictures but mostly
scenery and good photography.  Not everybody last night signed up to get
free slides.  As a matter of fact, most people did not.  Which I find
strange.<

This is an interesting subject -- just what does it take to make a
photograph valuable? Of course if's valuable to the photographer; it's a
personal creation by him/her. But is that value recognized by anyone else,
even a close family member?

When my mother passed away last year she left behind dozens of albums of
photos, many quite good, of her trips around the world. Mother in front of
the pyramids; mother in front of the Kremlin; mother with a Galapagas
tortoise; etc. etc. etc. I know they were very meaningful to her; she spent
many, many hours sorting and arranging and mounting them. But to me, they
were just cartons fill of pictures. They would just have filled up a shelf
in my already over-crowded garage, and so eventually they were just
trashed. My only misgiving about it was that I knew Mom would be turning
over in her grave had she been put there yet.

To have any real value, I think a picture needs to be somehow unique. Like
the photographer -- there've been a million pictures taken of Half Dome,
but if you have one taken by Ansel Adams... Another thing that makes a
picture unique is timely content -- pictures of public figures or ephemeral
events that are likely to be remembered with nostalgia, like Woodstock.

Unfortunately, just everyday pictures, no matter how good, taken by someone
no one but his wife has ever heard of, probably have no commercial value
beyond the life of the creator.


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