Bedside Reading: A Chat About Photographs

If you looked closely in the bedroom sneak peek photo you might have noticed that two books I'd highlighted previously are actually at my bedside: Our Share in the Home and The Art of Home Making. Every book in the night stand (not on top which is piled high with magazines and novels) is at least 50 years old. There are a couple that are over 100 years old (one is a map book that belonged to my step-grandfather).

Today's food for thought is from The Art of Home Making, c.1898, p.210:

In these times almost everybody can afford to have pictures taken often, and our boys and girls carry kodaks and have great success in taking likenesses of those they love and beautiful interiors. Whenever one can do it, it is well to have frequent pictures taken of children, for these darlings of the home change a great many times as they grow up, and it is interesting to watch the development, both of body and mind, as the little rosy, dimpled baby face changes to the older countenance of school-boy or school-girl, and then as that gives place to the look of the youth or maiden, and finally as the face takes on the beauty of maturity.

One blog that I follow daily, Making It Lovely, has adapted this advice for the digital age. She has two children and is taking a photo of each child monthly until their second birthday. Her eldest Eleanor is twenty-two months old; her youngest August-Ray-Balch is two months old.

Even if you don't have children, how interesting would this idea be for a newlywed couple? A photograph a month for the first year and then a photograph each year after? It would be interesting to see how the couple changes over the years.

One project that I've got planned is to digitize negatives from my old Kodak InstaChrome 110 and Canon AE-1 that I took in junior high and through college. My mother never liked having her photo taken and I realized that I had a collection of every day moments of my parents - when my mom got her new stove (it was a really big deal), when she presented my dad with a homebaked birthday cake, when they were sitting waiting for the ferry, etc.

What do you photograph? How do you tell your story?

Credits: Image taken by Eden Hensley Silverstein for Recipes for the Good Life.