Why take pictures? To preserve a moment. To document an event. To record something important or amusing. To remember. To admire. To create beauty or art. Do you take them for yourself, or for the ones who come after so that they remember, admire and see the art or the moment that the photographer valued.

Turn the page and here is a set of photos from downtown Havertown, and from Eagle Township. My brother in front of the Democratic headquarters, this must be from LBJ's presidential run because my father volunteered for that campaign. Two more photos show god knows what corner of west suburban Philadelphia. These two barely inspire memory, were certainly not framed with any idea of composition or beauty, and have very few identifying markers in them to help the uninformed understand what they are.

And yet they were important enough for someone to place in this album. I pass them on here, though I don't know what it is I am helping the reader to recognize or understand.

My father supposed that he was great photographer. I can't remember my mother ever so much as holding a camera (this can't be-- there are pictures of me, my brother and my father in circumstances where the only possible photographer would have been my mother). He had a nice, but not a great camera-- for one thing it was a viewfinder not an SLR, and he had only one lens. No zoom, no wide. And the worst indictment: that these photographs, even the ones that are interesting for other reasons, are just not very good. They have no focal point, or understanding of scale or composition.

It goes back to the very first photo in the book, of my father confronting the photographer-- see me! I am important, and I know what I know, better than you ever will! And we all bought it. My father was the family photographer, therefore he was good at it. Yet it patently wasn't true-- he wasn't very good at it. But the force of his belief in this was so strong that we all took it as gospel.

It is a terrible thing to grow up and learn how fallible and weak your parents are.