Save Your Life

I am 13 years away from middle age. That was Jamie's retort yesterday, to me saying "we are young adults", reminding me once again, how fast the years have gone. Catching us mostly unaware, so much time has slipped by. I guess this is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about photography. Photographs allow us to treasure things. The photographer Nan Goldin points out, "With photography, you don't lose anything again'. A photograph captures, albeit imperfectly, a single transient moment, that would otherwise be gone forever.

We live our lives through photographs. They mark our rites of passage – birth, birthdays, graduation, marriage, even death; they record our loves, encounters and travels – all our arrivals and departures. The camera is omnipresent. Photography parallels the way we remember things. We recall an event or a person by seeing an image in our mind’s eye. Our museums of personal memories are largely photographic.

Photographers bear witness to events for us; they inform and educate us through their eyes. From our parents' old wedding photos, we learn a bit more about the people we owe our lives to, we see that they were once just like us, young lovers starting out on a journey; "young adults 13 years away from middle age" with the same dreams, same ambitions, the same fears, as us now. Working almost like a time machine, the camera preserves things that are now past, allowing us to see things that would otherwise not be possible.

It is no use making photographs and then losing the photos. The advent of the digital camera has made it much easier to make and after that, to store photographs on a computer as virtual memory. Hard-disk failure however is always a danger. That is why I have spent the whole of Sunday morning backing up my photographs on my new 500GB maxtor harddisk. You should too. Start now or start soon. Save your life.