Who doesn’t like nostalgia?

Grannie McGregor. 100th Birthday.

It is safe to say that the older we become the more nostalgia fills our everyday.

Personally I love nostalgia and often wonder how I could photograph nostalgia without the passing of time.

It’s hard to imaging what early pioneers like Stephen Shore were feeling when then photographed a 1970’s Cadillac, in the 70’s. It certainly wasn’t nostalgia. If we did know what would resonate nostalgia later in life, then we would all know the future and then some.

In photography nostalgia often gets a bad rap, whether choosing to shoot film just because you like the way it looks (nostalgic), or by using a digital sepia filter app in an attempt to recreate some past experience- like when your grandfather wore a suit during a visit to the beach.

We may not be able to look into the future, but we can certainly look into the past, albeit with rose tinted vintage spectacles.

Despite making my first photographs some 40 years ago, I still do not consider any of those early attempts as being nostalgic. Even the image I made of my Grannie MacGregor on her 100th birthday (when I was just 15 years old) doesn’t really resonate a warm fuzzy sense of well being, to me she just looks old.