The company that I order photo prints from has a page buried on its website called “Beliefs” and it’s an absolute delight.
I decided to do something similar, so here are my beliefs that led to me starting and continuing my work via photoxo.
1. Your image is everything – If your images don’t look good, I don’t look good. I strive for the highest quality results.
2. Work Hard, Fast, and Safe – If you haven’t noticed, I think the work of safeguarding family photo memories is urgent. I look for ways to work more efficiently while maintaining the safety of your memories while they are in my care.
3. Create Moments of Joy – Our photos celebrate moments of joy and revisiting them brings that joy into the present and future.
4. Make access as simple as possible – How we access our digitized photos is constantly changing. When I started photoxo in 2014, flash drives were standard for storage and access. But certain new computers don’t have USB ports anymore. Online access means you can view your photos from any device, not just the computer where your flash drive is. Keeping access simple so you and your family can enjoy your photos is a primary goal.
5. It’s not enough to react to change, I try to anticipate it – the only thing we can be certain about is that technology will change in the coming years. My goal is to make your photos accessible regardless of how they are stored in the future. I avoid using proprietary software and use standard high-quality file types to ensure future access no matter what changes come.
6. Intergenerational stories matter – Photos tell the long view of our family’s story. The successes and challenges experienced by our family members contribute to our understanding of ourselves and our place within the family and can help us during challenging times.
7. Family photos are photo history – the history of photography often doesn’t include ordinary family photographs even though by number they make up the majority of photographs in existence. As a photo historian, I believe that these documents from our families belong in the larger history of photography and are as important as photos in museums.
8. We’re working to connect ourselves to the past – Through our photos we can get to know people who we’ve never met. We can experience a part of their life through what the camera records. We can also connect with past versions of ourselves, our own past, to make sense of our own life’s story arc.
9. And we’re working to connect to the future – The work we do now, preserving photos from now and the past, is for our descendants in the future to understand what our lives were like. Protecting our photos now is a distinctly forward-looking project that we can benefit from too in the present.
10. Everyone deserves this service – something I’m working toward in the future is a sliding scale, opportunities for probono work, and opportunities to sponsor work for a family because preserving photo memories is something that everyone deserves.
