The Value of a Picture

Recently, one of my mum’s closest friends died. For the announcement, his family used a picture I had taken of him. I had not seen it for more than five years.

I took the picture when I had only recently started Criss Films. It was the first event I had photographed with around fifty people there, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The shoot overwhelmed me, and then the edit overwhelmed me. I had no profiles, no proper processes and no established way of organising thousands of pictures or making a large set feel consistent.

By the time I finished, I was mostly just relieved to have delivered the pictures. Then I moved on.

When I saw that picture again five years later, I cried. Because the warmth of his presence had carried through.

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The Picture Had Not Changed

Five years earlier, I had looked at that picture and thought about the exposure, the edit, the composition and all the things I might have done better. Five years later, I was looking at exactly the same image and none of those things mattered.

The picture had not changed. Its value had.

That is one of the strange things about pictures. We tend to decide whether a picture is good very close to the moment it is taken, when we know the least about what it might eventually become.

A picture of a child changes when that child is thirty. A photograph of a house changes after the house has been sold. A picture of two friends can become evidence of a friendship after life has taken them in different directions.

A picture taken without much thought can eventually become one of the few places where somebody still exists exactly as you remember them. Photography does not only preserve what something looked like. Sometimes it preserves how being there felt.

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A Fraction of a Second

A picture taken on an iPhone represents just a few milliseconds. It is an almost impossibly small amount of time, but what it preserves can stay with us for the rest of our lives.

It can preserve the way somebody looked at you, a child at an age they will never be again, a room before it was redecorated or someone laughing at something nobody remembers saying. It can hold a person who was here and now is not.

We live alongside people for years, but sometimes those few milliseconds become the thing that brings the feeling of them back. The moment itself disappeared almost immediately. The picture did not.

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“Oh Yeah, I Forgot About That”

Memory does not disappear all at once. It fades around the edges.

You remember the person but forget the shirt they always wore. You remember the house but forget what was on the windowsill. You remember the holiday but not the view from the breakfast table, the pattern on the plates or the way the afternoon light fell across the room.

Then you find an old picture and think, Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

A picture can return details we did not realise we had lost. More importantly, those details can unlock other memories that were stored alongside them. One expression can bring back a voice. A familiar room can remind you of the conversations that happened inside it. A particular gesture can return the feeling of being around someone.

A picture is never the complete truth of a moment. It removes everything outside the frame. It cannot contain the full relationship between the people inside it, the years that came before or everything that made the moment matter. But it gives memory something solid to gather around. One visible detail can pull countless invisible ones back with it.

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We Are Making More Pictures Than Ever

We make more pictures than any generation before us. Our phones contain children, dinners, receipts, screenshots, buildings, friends, things we might buy and every version of the sky that made us stop and look up.

A picture no longer has to feel important before we take it. That should be liberating, but it has also made pictures incredibly easy to dismiss. We take them, post them, scroll past them and take another.

Thousands of photographs sit on our phones without being printed, organised or sometimes ever looked at again. Most of them may never become important, but we cannot always know which ones will.

The badly exposed picture of somebody laughing may eventually matter more than the carefully arranged portrait. An ordinary photograph of a familiar room may become precious after the furniture has gone, the walls have changed or the people who gathered there no longer can.

A picture’s value is often decided by the future.

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What We Measure

I spend a lot of time trying to make sure my pictures are seen. Like most people creating online, I have become used to measuring reach, likes, shares, comments, engagement rates and follower growth.

We call these things performance. We put them in reports and compare them with last month, last year or the post before. These figures can tell us how successfully a picture travelled, but they cannot tell us what it will eventually mean.

The picture used in the announcement may not have travelled very far when I first shared it. It did not need to. Years later, it reached the people who needed it and served a purpose I could never have anticipated when I pressed the shutter.

That is the problem with using visibility as the only measure of creative worth. Reach tells us how far something travelled; it cannot tell us what it carried.

A picture viewed by thousands may be forgotten tomorrow. A photograph seen by one family may remain with them for the rest of their lives. One is not automatically worth more because it produced the larger number.

Some pictures perform. Some pictures remain. Occasionally, we are lucky enough to take one that does both.

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The Photographer Does Not Get to Decide

Photographers make selections constantly. We choose the strongest frame and judge the light, focus, expression, composition and colour. We notice details that other people may never see.

But the person looking at the picture is not always evaluating it as a photographer. They may be looking for somebody they love, seeing themselves at an age they had forgotten or returning to a place that no longer exists in the same way.

They are retrieving meaning, not inspecting technique.

The photographer does not get to decide which picture will matter most. It may not be the sharpest image, the one with the best light or the frame we would put at the front of our portfolio. Sometimes the most valuable thing about a picture is simply that somebody was there to take it.

That does not mean craft is unimportant. Learning to use light, composition and timing helps us take stronger pictures and gives a moment a better chance of surviving clearly. But technical excellence and emotional value are not the same thing.

A picture does not have to be technically remarkable to become irreplaceable.

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What I Was Actually Chasing

When I started, I thought I wanted to become a photographer. I wanted to understand the camera, take better pictures and make work that looked professional. I still want those things, but seeing this picture again reminded me that they were never the whole reason.

I do not usually photograph people. I am drawn to lines, symmetry, reflections and the small details that can make something ordinary look new. I want to show people what they might otherwise walk past.

The real skill was never just knowing how to take the picture. It was knowing what was worth noticing. And sometimes its worth only translates years later.

A picture cannot keep a person here. But it can preserve a fraction of a second in which they still are. It can wait quietly for years until the day somebody needs to see them again.

And when that time comes, nobody asks what settings you used.

RIP Bill, I’ll miss you 🩷