Photographs have a particular power to keep people alive well past the demise of their physical being. Even before I began to take pictures, I was fascinated by the ways that old family photos helped me to connect with people that I’ve never met. When I began to make images, I was completely fascinated by how they stopped time.

I was on a flight recently and trying to use the time to clear old photos off of my phone. Even though I’ll have a string of 60 pictures of my dog playing with her friend, I find it hard to erase any of them. I notice that I morbidly think about how much each of the images will mean to me when she’s gone. She’s only eight months old now and I have at least 1000 images of her.

When I started taking photos in a more serious way in my early 20s, I was very aware that the process was a little like planting seeds. Even then I knew that images would mean more later, when the subject of the images were no longer with us. My first real project was shooting in Malls, and it took 20 years for the resonance of these images to have an impact. That’s when I came to understand that after around 20 years our older memories move to a different area of our brain, and firing up that area activates a different response, one that takes us out of the present in some manner. Maybe that’s nostalgia.

After I shot in malls, I began to seriously document the music scene that I was a part of. I knew ahead of time that this work wouldn’t mean as much until later. I wasn’t trying to make flashy or exciting images. I mostly wanted to stop time, to capture bands and moments which would reveal their importance in the future. I knew that others had done this for movements they were a part of, and the work gave me a sense of purpose. I understood that most of these bands would last in some way, and that these images would have greater import in the future.

At the same time that I was going through the images on my phone in order to clear out repeat images of my dog, I was also looking at the images that I shot of musicians back in the day. I’m 54 now, and a surprising number of my friends have passed away. It was a little sobering to notice that a number of the bands have a member who is no longer with us. Some of those bands are still alive, and playing again.

A few months ago a good friend, that I occasionally played music with, died. I have a lot of photos of him, but I was mostly able to quickly find some more recent images that I shot when he visited a few years ago. He was struggling a bit at the time due to some relationship issues. I was struggling with my father’s death. He had been hit by a car a decade earlier, not far from my childhood home that I now live in. I felt like he was unsettled and everything in the house was breaking.

My friend and I went to the site of his death in order to perform a ritual to bring him some peace. When we got to the site of his death with some plants and objects from the house, I realized I needed to ask him to accompany us home. When we got home and laid the plants near his ashes birds erupted in song. Going through photos from that day for an article about his life connected me to both him and my father. Photos have profound power. We will all become dust but the photos can make our memories more of a blessing, even as they connect us to something we’ve lost. I’ve stopped squirling most things, and given away many others, but I find it hard to let go of photos

Michael Galinsky

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The need to capture the world is an instinct, and one I now believe is also genetic. While it took me time to pay attention to what my parents were creating, when I did I was totally absorbed. Something about my father’s music photos made me feel as though I was there with him, like he'd taken my hand and showed me the world of his emergence into adulthood which was surrounded by experimentation and loud expression. What started as amazement turned somewhat into envy, wanting to have lived in this electric bosom and also to have his keen eye and ability to capture. What I found is that my envy was getting in the way of my ability to learn, and quickly I shifted away from spectator and into apprentice. Something about music is so ephemeral, being able to capture even an ounce of that energy in a split second feels like a magical power. When I started going to shows, I too had the need to be able to hold on to what I was witnessing, so I knew what I had to do was get out my camera. At first, I sucked. This was hard, and it took a lot of encouraging from my father to keep going. "Dare to suck," is the best advice he's given me.