I can't imagine going through that sort of thing. I don't guess many people can. I know it seems surreal for me to look at the old pictures, so I can only imagine what my parents must feel like when they glance over their old photographs. I have noticed that isn't something most people do very often. There is a certain reality to a photograph that is hard to accept, but on the other hand, there is a certain unreality, as well.
Good paintings seem to have much more life than photographs.
When I look at an old picture of myself, it is almost as if there is some fellow out there who looks almost like me and knows all the same people I either know or used to know. He is the one that usually shows up for the photographs and then vanishes, leaving me behind to wonder what he was thinking. Old family photographs, like little slices of life forever frozen in time, are as valuable to me as anything I could ever own. I was in a photograph the other day with some friends of mine, just hanging out. The picture didn't look bad, but it did not fit my mental picture of myself.