During the late 1960s I took pictures of Can-Am and USRRC races for a magazine called Competition Press and Autoweek. I had lots of images of famous drivers like Dan Gurney, Bruce McLaren, Dennis Hulme, Jim Hall, Parnelli Jones, Mark Donohue, etc. During one of my moves in the 1970s almost all the negatives got tossed. I do have about 4 36-exposure rolls left from one race in 1968.
When I first realized the negs were missing, it didn’t bother me much. What would I do with them? But things changed in the late 1990s when the Internet became popular outside of academic circles. There were lots of people who wanted to see images like that, many venues for posting them, and we all realized what a unique moment in autosports the Can-Am series was. I would really like to have them now.
My experience may be far from universal, but I think that probably there are images that most serious photographers have made that couldn’t be made anymore and capture a period that in retrospect is of interest to many.
So hold on to those images!
Great shots!
Good advice. Sorry to hear they were lost but thanks for sharing these!
Even the images you keep might end up being interesting for reasons you never anticipated. The world changes. Mundane things become historical curiosities. Things you once took for granted disappear.
My sister made a joke video about her life to give to our parents. Must have been in the 1980s. When she recently dug it up, it became fascinating purely because of its age. What people were wearing. What an office phone looked like. The furniture in her apartment.
All those throwaways on a memory card are historical documents. Before you know it, they’ll be colored by nostalgia. Eventually they’ll become elegies.
Well said.