This is me and my dad in Trafalgar Square when I was two years old. I don’t have many photographs of my dad, and even fewer of the two of us together. He was always the one taking photographs when I was growing up. Sadly, he died when I was 19, before my own interest in photography developed (if you’ll excuse the ill-timed pun).
It is one of my great regrets that I don’t have more photographs of him, making the ones I do have even more special. I have my memories, but memories fade as we get older, whereas a photograph is a permanent memento of a fleeting moment of time.
I can remember sobbing uncontrollably a few days after he died, trying to find the negative of my favourite photograph of the two of us, taken when I was 15. That may have been the moment I truly understood the value and meaning of photography.
This is why, at the risk of sounding preachy, I have never understood people who spend a fortune on weddings, parties and celebrations, then either forgotten about photography or scrimped on it. When the day is over all you have to remind you is memories…and photographs.