Art is not the only object that belongs on walls. Old family photographs can often evoke deeply personal feelings and touch those that were part of the journey.
One of our clients brought us about a dozen old family photographs they dug up in their attic to frame for their parents as a gift. The gems were a mix of professional photos from their wedding, snapshots from when they were dating, a small photo of them together on the day the husband proposed, and even a photo from their high school prom.
Instead of formatting all of the photographs, so the edges were covered, and everything was nice and clean, the client chose to float several of the more uneven and damaged ones. Some of these had been trimmed in the past, to be put into scrapbooks, and others had clearly just been handled a lot.
Mike Demaggio, Preparator at A Street Frames, reflects on the client’s process, “He liked the unevenness of the edges, and the fact that they had been passed around so much. He believed those marks suggested something very personal about the photos; they reflected themselves and their relationship. This was the whole reason for taking them out of storage in the first place. It was clear that these photos had been important to his parents in the past, and he wanted to surprise them, by bringing them back out, and putting them up on their walls, where they could see them every day.”
Life moves on and it moves very quickly. Sometimes we can’t find time to sit down and soak in the memories with the family photo albums and scrapbooks. Sometimes our fondest memories find their way into our attics, and closets, and stay buried there. But when those memories find their way out of the attic and make their way onto the walls, it’s like visiting the past all over again, and it reminds us of all of the good things in our lives.