While I've always loved my grandpa he's always been someone I've felt I don't really know. Even though we talk via phone periodically, he lives in Georgia and I only get to see him once a year at most. After my grandma was diagnosed with lung cancer last July we started hearing from him more often, and have visited afew times in the last months to make sure he's doing okay. The first time we visited I went looking for something to do around his apartment and found bags and bags of random pictures packed away in a closet. I decided I would scan a bunch of them into his computer and send them to myself so I could have copies of them at home. As I sat alone with the computer, my grandpa came and began to talk to me about some of the pictures. Pictures, he told me, he'd taken. I asked him about different techniques he'd used in different pictures, and he explained everything. He told me about his Leica (which I was disappointed to hear he sold afew years ago), the darkroom he'd bought set up in their old apartment in New Jersey, and how he'd once been asked to shoot pictures for a local theater group to be shown on display during intermission. I really enjoyed talking to my grandpa about it; his enthusiasm for photography was contagious.
It was great to have a photographer explain some of his pictures to me, but it was even better to have that photographer be my grandpa.
