|
WHY I CREATE LEGACY PORTRAITS I create artful monochrome studio portraits and magazine-style environmental portraits using digital cameras and real black and white film to create archival prints of the most important people in our families—our grandparents and great-grandparents. These
legacy portraits, printed and framed, will last for generations and
are experienced on a daily basis in the family's home, on their walls.
A real photographs is more
meaningful than a computer full of digital snapshots, images stored
on hard drives somewhere, or buried in a phone. This is my photo documentary, a project close to my heart and for the community, making portraits of seniors of all ages living at their homes and at senior facilities. It’s important that seniors know that even at an advanced age, they are valuable and they should be documented and celebrated, and their photograph needs to be made. They’ve reached a huge milestone, having lived a good long life. I seek to document it. I bring a background and lights. I set up a small studio so they look their best. The senior centers make it a big deal—they announce the session times and give them a time to shine, to dress up and look their sharpest. It's a big deal to be a big deal. There’s no cost—these portrait sessions are scheduled around my commercial work. Each senior get a print, too. It’s a personal project to make photos of the most important subject that is often overlooked or left out of photographs as they advance in age—certainly not dressed up for a formal photograph. This is a project about documenting our senior citizens' wonderful faces for future generations to know and remember them, to understand who their ancestors were. Family photographs are historic photographs, and there won't be any if, as futurists predict, the photographs of today are lost to computer failures and obsolescence. These beautiful faces will last because their photograph is printed--that's the key to making sure our seniors' photographs aren't lost to a digital dark age. Activities Directors and Program Coordinators, please call me to get on your schedule. I am photographing at other area senior facilities, too, so I need to work your senior community's session into my calendar. Shoots are available in Denver, Boulder, as well as in Los Angeles and throughout southern California. I also schedule shoots throughout the U.S. when I am traveling to various cities on commercial/advertising shoots. ABOUT
ME CONTACT
ME CONNECT
WITH ME
|
"No
one's asked to take my picture in...I can't tell you how long." "Thank you for caring and taking my picture." There are plenty of photographers making portraits of young people. But where are the seniors? Our grandparents? Why is no one photographing the elderly? They used to be revered as our wise elders. Now, youth is so valued, few photographs are being made of them. That's why I started The Wise Photo Project. In-between
my commercial shoots, I work with senior centers across the U.S. and
bring a portable studio to create beautiful legacy portraits of their
senior citizens, to celebrate the seniors' beautiful faces, and to
gift the family with a priceless portrait of their family's patriarch
and matriarch.
|
Copyright 2018, Kenneth Wajda. All Rights Reserved