Note: I am going to warn the members of this board now – should you make a comment on this post, please be sure that it is on topic. This is not a thread to act like an ass. I am posting the following for discussion purposes.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then the following two tales speak volumes. They do, in fact, capture the lives of two people long after they have already left this earth. Memories in black and white and polaroid; frozen in time for an eternity. I am not posting any preview pictures here because I strongly suggest that you go to the articles linked.

He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died
I was rumbling around the net the other day via digg and a particular story jumped out at me. The link was titled “He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died” and it came from mental_floss. Unfortunately, due to the digg effect, the server which is the source intermittently goes down so you may not be able to see the original site. According to the article’s author, Chris Higgens,

What started for me as an amusing collection of photos — who takes photos every day for eighteen years? — ended with a shock. Who was this man? How did his photos end up on the web?

By merely reading through Chris’ article I was stunned. I thought I was going to see something along the lines of Noah Kalina’s work which brought to light the practice of taking a picture of yourself everyday. This was different. Jamie Livingston’s “Photo-of-the-Day” site was captured 18 years of not only the man but what he saw, loved and found interesting.

The Lives of Cyndie French and Derek Madsen
Reading through this triggered a memory of a photo essay that I read before. Renée C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. I strongly suggest reading through it. The first time I finished the series it felt as if someone had opened the emotional flood gates. In the span of 20 black and white photographs I ran the emotional gauntlet. If you have ever experienced anything similar with a friend or family member, then you cannot help but feel empathetic. It is a whirlwind of joy and pain and sorrow with a 10 year old boy at its epicenter.

And it got me to thinking: whereas these photos are a slice of time preserving someone else’s life, what about the person behind it? What about the person taking the picture? What type of toll does it take on them? I got part of my answer while at my dad’s funeral last year at Arlington Cemetery. I had initially thought that the photographers tried to stay impartial and emotionless. After the ceremony, as the people were offering our family condolences and we were leaving the grave, the photographer came up to my family to pay her respects. She had been crying and sobbing along side us, even though she had done this hundreds of times before.