Documenting our changing world is important

By Rick Sammon, For The Associated Press

Photography has the power to freeze and preserve moments, showing viewers what people and places looked like at a particular point in time.

That's what writer and photographer Joe Farace (author of 23 books) stresses to his students at photography workshops and to all amateur and professional photographers.

For more than 30 years, Farace has been documenting the places he has lived. He has photographed the buildings in Dickeyville, Md., a 200-year-old enclave within the city limits of Baltimore. He was so taken with the community that he bought a 100-year-old home there so he could photograph the unique environment.

"Back then," he told me, "I created images of Dickeyville using traditional landscape photography techniques."

Farace moved to Colorado in 1981, and a friend got him interested in taking pictures of historic Colorado barns. That practice developed into documenting farms in the Northeastern Colorado town where he now lives, which is being swallowed up by new homes and shopping centers.

Farace's approach to photography has changed since he lived in Maryland. Now he uses digital technology.

"Some of my photographs are documentary representations showing the farm structures as they actually appear -- straight shots," he explained, "but others are sources for eventual digital enhancements."

Much as Ansel Adams "pre-visualized," or envisioned, what his final print was going to look like at the moment he clicked the shutter, Farace often thinks about the kind digital enhancements he will use to manipulate a picture in the digital darkroom.

When asked if his visual style has changed too, he said he uses more zoom lenses and longer focal length lenses because he can't always get close to the buildings.

He also tends to shoot in inclement weather. "A little snow adds to the mood of an image, and I think my images these days are more dramatic and introspective than my Dickeyville work," he said.

In Baltimore, Farace provided photographs to historical preservation groups on a pro bono basis, but he has plans for exhibiting some of his Colorado farm images at a local gallery.

"Twenty years from now, it won't matter if the only people who see these photographs are my neighbors' kids," he explained. "I want these images tell the story of what this place was like when there were still family farms out here, so the next generation can see what the land was originally like."

Farace urges photographers to not only document places they love, but people as well.

"I'm always surprised that people spend lots of time and money restoring images of their grandparents and great-grandparents after they have passed away, but little time making snapshots and portraits of them while they're still alive," he said.

He urges photographers to use their technical and aesthetic skills to take pictures of the people they love, and to display and preserve those images in an album or on a Web site. In that way, future generations will know what the people looked like in contemporary surroundings, not just restored photographs.

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