Throwbacks - If You Snooze You'll Lose

By Skip Cohen

With the holidays comes time with family and friends. So don't let this year go by without capturing those stories from your parents and grandparents!

All of you can capture video with your cameras or even phones. Don't let your kids years from now feel frustrated because they've got photographs without the backstories. I wish I'd followed my own advice, at least with my folks.

I was going through old papers and albums of my Dad's today. The two pictures up top are of my mother. The one on the left says, "Homecoming - University of Illinois, October 1946." The one on the right was her engagement announcement a short time later. What I love the most, though, is the cigarette in Mom's hand! I know she smoked Pall Malls and quit when I was around twelve.

But here's my real point to today's post - I have hundreds of photographs without backstories, or for that matter, recognition of the people in the images, or the occasion. Mom passed away in 2013 and Dad in 2015, leaving me without any family members to share the stories of their journey.

So, as you get together with older members of your family over the holidays, take the time to get them talking about how they got started; their first jobs; how they met their spouses; trouble they got into when they were your age...and the list goes on and on. Then, pull out some of those old albums and shoeboxes and write down the names of people in those photographs.

And if we learned nothing else through the pandemic crisis, is that life is too short. So with the renewed sense of family in this country, it's the perfect opportunity for you to record as many memories as you can...and don't forget about doing a legacy promotion for your clients combined with their family portrait!

Time is the one commodity we never have enough of, but as artists, you have the ability to capture those memories and stop time. Now, help people capture the stories from the past, starting with your own family.