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My grandfather passed away last week. On Tuesday I flew down to Gainesville, Florida to attend the memorial service for William Henry Drummond who died at the age 87. Family is not the focus of this blog, but I write this post because photography was pivotal in my celebration of Bill’s life.

My brother (musician and audio wizard Nick Drummond) and I were charged with preparing a short slideshow for the memorial service, and shortly after arriving we began to comb though over a dozen meticulously kept photo albums. We made our selects, digitized about a 100 of them, extracted a little audio from old VHS tapes, and added a soundtrack. Some 20 hours later we had a 12-minute multimedia presentation ready to go. The service opened with Bill’s own voice followed by a chronological series of images.

Without doubt, it was a powerful experience to build a narrative of this man’s life using many photographs that I’d never seen before. The early images we found, particularly images from the 30s, 40s and 50s, are beautiful – a testament to film, craft and making images intentionally. As the decades progressed, the images became looser, more plentiful and less formal, but there were still gems to be found. Ultimately, what struck me was how important it is to always make images and document stories. Photographs of those seemingly insignificant events in one’s own life may one day prove to be a great gift to your loved ones and community.