This is David Hoffman, filmmaker, about to tell you a story about photography, about photographs.

I'm nuts about photographs.

I present them on my community pull down menu on my channel home page every day, just about photographs that I've collected.

I've collected photographs since I was a boy.

They mostly were in photo albums like this one.

So I'm going to just show you a few pages from this photo.

One says X marks the spot of my first year in school.

Notice the shadow on the right side of the screen because I'm going to tell you about that.

All right, here's another one.

Beauties aren't days what it says, and it's got a woman tract of woman on her back porch with fish the back porch.

Very important at the time.

Snapshot photography.

You couldn't shoot indoors because there wasn't enough light.

These are called snapshots there, clearly amateurs.

I just love them.

His one.

Did you say Bear Valley, My, my, and it shows a really good looking woman with her bare legs at a time when you didn't show your bail legs because it was not proper.

Well, I bought hundreds of these albums I bought them because they were amateur because they gave me a sense of history, unlike professional photography, and I began to collect them in categories that I noticed when I was young.

That fascinated me.

Kids with guns, real guns pose outside in front of the house.

People drinking alcohol, big deal, particularly women drinking alcohol, getting loose, if you will.

People in front of their houses.

As I said, Just look at some of these wonderful moments where people get out in front of the house and take a picture taking pictures because the picture captured the moment it went in a photo album.

In my dad's day, we had slide shows when I went on a vacation to do England with my family.

My dad took pictures, and when we came back, you've been invited over the neighbors, and everybody would sit around and look at a slide show.

The photograph, the amateur photograph still had meaning, and they were very good amateur photographers.

And then there was my car sitting in my car, standing in front of my car, my first car.

Many, many photos fascinated me, and from that came an epiphany.

My first epiphany women.

Lots of women took the car, left the house, went out with other women and did different things than they would have done if men were around.

These were kind of outings, and the outings required the camera.

In fact, it wasn't the same gun about if there wasn't a camera, and the camera was largely the Kodak brownie invented by Kodak around 1900.

Many people bought the millions of people bought them, and those who didn't have the money borrowed them.

And these Kodak's, which it did was you took the pictures, and then you sent the camera with the film to Kodak, who realized the film was where the money was.

So they were gonna process it for you, and they were going to make it extremely easy.

They had these phrases which became advertising phrases.

You push the button, we'll do the rest.

Another one was, It's not an event unless you photograph it.

That's key.

It's not an event unless you photograph it.

And then they had the Kodak girl.

They showed lots of women because women were adopting this camera and using this camera on these outings to have second epiphany all kinds of fun, different fund.

Then they would have had had men taking the picture.

They begin to do outrageous stuff.

They became sassy, the kind of broke rules.

They acted like they were getting married.

Two women were getting married and they were extraordinarily affectionate to each other.

Physically affectionate in ways.

I noticed when men took the picture, the women never were.

How do I know that I'm right about this?

The Shadow.

I began to notice that whenever I saw that shadow, I knew a woman had taken a picture.

And when I looked at the pose, it was different.

They were having fun.

They were goofing around.

They were being sloppy.

They were eating.

They were showing things about themselves that they never showed two men.

This was kind of a breakthrough of freedom, which in some cases stuck it directly to the things men controlled, such as marriage.

I got so good at this that even if of the shadow wasn't there.

I knew this was women photographing women, and one of the things they did was cross dressing.

That was extremely popular at that time.

Huge amount of photographs in my collection, our course dressing women where somewhere I think his men and somewhere acting is women.

Okay, so of course now photographs are massive.

They always said photographs were going to die.

You know, when film came out, Who's going to take a picture anymore?

We have film, particularly home meet millimeter film.

Then when television came out and video came out, we're gonna want take a picture of this video.

And when the phone manufacturers began to put a camera in a phone and charge 25 cents for that sending in that picture, everybody said, Wait a minute, this is a phone.

Where you putting a camera in it for?

Of course.

Now we all have phones, which arm or camera than they are Phone.

So the photo is endearing.

It lasts.

It's three dimensional.

Great photographs and amateurs air Great.

You look at the moment in time, but you see deeper.

You see what in your own mind what happened before and what happened after you kind of imagine mawr to the story than that moment That iconic moment shows and of course, photographs become iconic.

So I collected these albums.

I got quite a few of them.

EBay comes out I really start collecting photographs.

I write.

People say, Why you selling your album?

Because it doesn't mean anything.

They say Great Aunt Josephine in Yosemite, Lewis and Wife by Trees That's what it says.

Now we have number 60945 to thousands of them on our hard drives, going to be the same thing for the next generations.

Meaningless unless we get the story around the photograph or the photograph is iconic, so these albums $5.10 dollars $25.50 dollars $500.1000 dollars.

Who.

The house buying a photograph album for $1000?

I write the number one purchaser because I can't buy them anymore than too expensive.

And she's working for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, who's collecting amateur photographs because they see it is history.

It is history.

It's a unique view of history, kind of like the history I feel as a filmmaker.

I don't care about the important people and that important set up the tripod and shoot the event.

I care about ordinary citizens and the lives that they live told in an extraordinary way.

So then I decide okay, can't afford that anymore.

I'm going to collect junkie photographs that are awful.

And they're selling on eBay.

Awful photograph out of focus.

Telephone pole closed line with clothes on it from 1950 to, uh, this is our house.

And you just see Ah, house.

No.

Who's gonna want that?

Well, they start going up $50.100 dollars.

So I write the guy who's bidding mean he's in Australia and he also collects horrible photographs.

Uh, where are my today?

I'm trying to shoot my own cell phone photographs in iconic ways.

This is a moment means a lot to me means a lot to my Children.

Maybe it'll mean something to you.

Even if you're not from my family.

Hopefully it'll mean something to the future.

So then awareness by me off the value the enormous intrinsic value off ordinary folks lives done in extraordinary ways.

Are women still using cameras with other women?

Are they different when they take pictures with other women present and not men?

I don't know.

I'd love to hear from you about that one.

Thank you for hearing me out on this.

Thank you for watching my photographs on my community.

Pull down menu on my home page channel on YouTube and tell me what you think.