Dad, Shanghai China. circa 2010.

A photographer friend visited me this afternoon and lamented the current state of photography. His words mourned the dying of simple photography as an appreciated art. The simple process and physicality of photographs are no longer valued, nor the humble desire to just see what something looks like photographed, straight, as is. History will not be kind. He digressed.

We later took a walk and popped by a print shop. The printer was alone but busy printing images on order. I noticed a series of photographs in queue on his computer screen. They were vernacular travel photographs. But there was something about them that intrigued me. The pictures all depicted a tall, thinnish man standing alone against various landscapes, across various seasons. He wore a smile in all of them. There was one of him on the banks of a river, one on a mountain top, and another against a pole in a snowy winterscape. The falling snow glittered like stars in the foreground against the light of the camera’s flash. It looked like the tall, thinnish man led a happy life and travelled the world over and beyond.

Then there was that last picture in queue, that had two men standing side-by-side in that same snowy winterscape. The tall, thinnish man was smiling as usual, as was his friend (I assumed).

I asked about the photographs. The printer said he was printing them for the friend of the tall, thinnish man. He had passed away suddenly, unexpectedly. The photographs were a gift to the daughters he left behind.