Why Photo Prints Matter

You’ll get no argument from me… digital photos are amazing! But why do prints still hold a very important place in the life of a photo?

Physical Objects Are Timeless

The more drastically life changes, the more I love old things! When I hold in my hands the outfit I brought my daughters home from the hospital in, it looks, feels, and smells the same as it did all those years ago. It’s become a tiny piece of the reality of a life now many years behind me, but more precious with each passing day. Holding photos from that time is much the same, a tangible connection to the people and memories most precious to me, one that does not change as the world around me does.

When digital photos were new, they were seen as a way to preserve our memories forever, safe from fire, disaster, and damp basements. As it turned out, digital photos ARE lost, but in a very different way. Mostly, they are simply forgotten. With a collection of tens of thousands of digital photos that live only on your phone, the result is so overwhelming that most are never seen again. Scrolling through years of photos mixed with screenshots of recipes is not the same experience as sitting around the kitchen table and passing around a photo album of life from 20 years past! When you print a photo, you single it out as worthy of a place at the table in the years to come.

A Gift For the Future

What if you could send a message to your future self, to your children, to your grandchildren? What would you say? A photo can convey all that’s most important to you right now, all the love you feel as this stage of your life is unfolding, and send it forward in time to anyone who holds it in their hands and imagines life in the world you inhabit. Technology changes, and we have no way of knowing whether or not future generations will have access to our trove of cloud-based memories. Digital photos have a valuable place in our lives and probably always will, but it can also be said that they can’t compete with the tactile experience of a photo made to last a lifetime and more. What a gift!

Certainly it is true that a printed photo can be destroyed or lost just as readily as a digital, but we really do lose something by letting go of the idea that photos are meant to exist in the real world and not just the digital.