My Father passed away last week, and where I usually keep my personal life separate from my photography site and Instagram, I think it is appropriate to talk about my dad because of his impact on my photography. My dad always encouraged my photography, bought me my first 35 mm camera, a Pentax K1000, and he paid for all my schooling. He was the one who arranged my access to photograph the Pasadena Police Department which was probably the most important documentary series I have done to date. That series led me in to a law enforcement career and it currently is getting a lot of interest from people exploring the issues of the criminal justice system. My dad liked to photograph, had a Rollei among other cameras, and a bathroom darkroom before I was born. He always encouraged me with my photography. Successful people need a support system and advocates, he surely was both for me. At 93 he was very tired and had lived a full life. His moderate dementia had taken away his mentoring abilities a few years back but our bond was strong to his last breath and his love is something I will always have. I have no regrets, and I am nothing but thankful for all the time I had with my dad, he had a huge impact on my life and who I have become.
Without getting in to all the details why , with my dad’s passing I found myself in a situation where I had to pull his funeral together in 48 hours. Luckily I have photography skills and a great friendship with the owner of the lab who prints my larger prints, otherwise I don’t know how I would have pulled it off. When I was waiting on the prints for the service the owner and I were talking about how often he print memorial photographs. He then brought up the fact that so many people only have low resolution files of important images now. We have talked about it before, but he told me that he has had numerous people come to him looking for enlargements for a funeral and they have image file sizes which couldn’t even produce a quality 5 x 7 print. I am lucky in that my family has an extensive collection of family prints and some negatives. I also was able to get most these prints in to safe archival storage years ago and have done some digital archiving of images. I only mention this because too many people today live in a Snap Chat world where images are just seen for several seconds and archiving of the most important images is left to a third party cloud service with no hard copy backups. Luckily my mom has maintained all family photographs in good order.
As we all know the camera allows us to capture a fraction of time and retain memories for our lifetime, hopefully longer. I found myself photographing my parents a lot over the last couple years, probably in an attempt to preserve time and hold on. The color photograph above is from my dad’s 93rd Birthday , just with my iPhone, he passed 35 days later. Its powerful for me because my mom is in red in the background getting things ready in the kitchen. She cared for my dad a lot the last few years, and she was the homemaker in the relationship. I know I am stating the obvious by pointing out how important it is to maintain good quality prints and files of the images which will over time mean the most to us.
Brent Valentine with his Grandfather 6-16-19
As a photographer I am constantly looking for images and framing elements in my mind. So this summer when I saw this image, and the way the light was, I knew I had am image with the potential for strong meaning. As I took it I also knew that image would have the most strength after my father passed and that time was approaching. It was one of those photos you take but wish it wasn’t there for you to see. I ended up using this image on the back of the memorial service program along with a Bible verse my son provided me that he felt described his grandfather best. That verse by the way was Philemon 1:7 “Your love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hears of the Lord’s people.” No matter your faith, or even if you don’t have a faith, the message is a good one for all of us to live by.