Moments and Memories

We never knew we were making memories.  We just knew we were having fun.

As a child I knew my four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction from winter.  Known for having the best on earth, people travel from all over the world to experience Utah’s snow, but any child in Utah will tell you that the “perfect snow” isn’t that ski powder, and it lasts only for a moment.  That wet, sticky, wonderful cold that we all think of when we see snowball fights and snowmen, lasts only for a day, and falls only a few times a year.  Once it stops snowing, the cold sets in, and the dry snow turns to ice, slush, and powder, and the moments of today turn to the memories of tomorrow.

The same is for any moment in our lives.  Life doesn’t happen in minutes.  It happens in moments.  I began taking pictures fifteen months ago when I lost my childhood best friend and realized that in fourteen years, I had less than ten pictures of him.  Those moments, like that “perfect snow” crystalized and became memories.   But it shouldn’t take the loss of a loved one to realize that, because by then it’s too late.  In “Moments and Memories” I document a “perfect snow” day as it happens, capturing those instants so that when the time come, they are just as frozen as the air and snow that gave birth to them.

(There are over 50 photos in the final collection of this project but I have just included a few)

This project started out as a deep look on depression with technology.  I had the scenes planned out, the set put together, and I was simply waiting for these two to come home and be my models.  

When they came home we got talking and laughing because of how stressed we all were and how we simply wanted to just go out and play in the snow as it was a perfect snow day.  I couldn’t bring myself to get excited about my photography project and threw out that I wanted to go on a snow photograph adventure and that if they wanted to join they could.

This book is the adventured that followed that.  

But the special thing about these photos is that they reminded me why I love taking pictures and why I do it.  In the last 15 months I have taken more than 20,000 photos, and less than 1,000 of those were planned out photos that I staged and took with forethought.  As I took these I was reminded that I take photos to capture the soul and the memory, not the smile and perfection.  That’s not what makes photography special. 

And now, even when their footprints in the snow are covered or melted, and someday we all move on to different colleges, we still have the memory.  We still have that moment.

And that, it what photography is about.