Photography and Alzheimer's

A.I. Image from Adobe Stock

by Skip Cohen
 
With my involvement in the Memory Care Alliance here in Sarasota, I want to start sharing more information about this horrible disease. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all died of Alzheimer's. Being tested for the disease myself a few months ago (which showed no signs) led to me working on a project with one of medicine's leading neurologists.

While Alzheimer's has nothing to do with the business and marketing of photography, over the years, it's remarkable how anybody I talk to seems to have been touched by the disease. Unlike the Kevin Bacon three degrees of separation game, most often, it's just one degree of separation to Alzheimer's with most people. 

Wearing the hat of "Director" for the Memory Care Alliance, I want to share more information on this horrible disease to help increase awareness. I've seen numbers that estimate by 2050, the number of people with Alzheimer's will rise to thirteen million. The main goal of the Alliance is to become a network of companies working to provide the best quality of support for Alzheimer's patients, their families, and caregivers.

With my mother, as Alzheimer's took a greater hold, one of the most fun things we could do with her was to pull out old photographs. She wouldn't remember what she had for breakfast, but she could name every sorority sister from Ohio State! With each face she recognized, the backstories would start to flow. It was as if the events happened the day before, not sixty years earlier.

Here's my point today - take more pictures! Don't just leave them on a card or your phone forever. Photography is about capturing memories, lots of them. They don't have to be milestone events and show-stoppers - but the more, the better. Put on the hat of the family historian. If you have kids, when you are with family and friends, give them assignments as if they were photojournalists. And with senior members of your family, set up your phone or camera on video and capture the stories of their lives while they're still here. 

With the weekend approaching, don't wait to start building or organizing your personal imaging archives. Capture memories now—they'll become priceless in the years ahead.

To put the seriousness of the disease in even more perspective, check out the one-minute video from the Alzheimer's Association below.