The Photos That Touch Our Souls - Revisited.
Probing the hazy filter of time
Last year I published this post when I discovered that there was no record of 9/11 in my photos.
There’s this game I play. The Photos “where was I” game on my iPhone.
Today I lost. In a big way.
The game is to see what you were doing on this day in a prior year. It’s easy and fun to do with the Photos app because in the YEARS tab your Apple Photos Library will show a picture from the nearest date in that particular year.
New Year’s Eve in 2015?
Got it.
Our twentieth anniversary?
Ahhh, yes.
Today I thought to look at 2001. You know?
And there was nothing.
Just a gap in the pictures from August 29th to September 23rd.
Smiles in both places.
As if nothing had happened.
I was shocked.
Then I recalled that the iPhone wasn’t launched until 2007. No one lived with a camera. We didn’t record every moment. Entire weeks went by without capturing an image.
How could that be?
I was in Chicago on business, 800 miles away, when the towers went down. It took 3 days and the last rental car in town to get home. Today, that trip would be a hundred photos and a dozen videos, easy. And it would be something that my kids would have, someday, to talk about and understand the trauma of it all.
I’d have taken photos of my dear friend Dee behind the wheel, clocking miles across Ohio. Crowded rest stops in Pennsylvania with a throng of shocked faces and three piece suits trying to just get home like us. The view from the George Washington Bridge at sunrise with smoke rising from Ground Zero in the distance.
Empty Manhattan streets.
You had to be there.
But the iPhone was 6 years away.
We take silly photos.
But we take profound photos too.
Photos that make us think. Remind us how it was. And share the moment.
I went to the 9/11 memorial on a rainy, dismal winter day. And even though it wasn’t timely, it’s a reminder of those days and it serves to reboot the experience and serve as the placeholder that I never made at the time.
And it reminds me that photos aren’t that literal. They jumpstart memories and touch our souls. They’re a catalyst for bigger things.
So as part of your legacy collection, don’t shy away from the more challenging events. We are in a place that didn’t exist 22 years ago. We can capture everything and leave a legacy story of our lives in ways that our forefathers never could.
Don’t leave any gaps.
More often than not, these are the pictures that touch our souls.