There are only a few surviving photos of my grandparents around, and fewer still of my great-grandparents. It wasn't that they didn't want their photographs taken. It was the fact that the technology was essentially new and relatively expensive.

When I interviewed Dr. Leonard Shlain, the author of such books as “Art and Physics” and “Sex, Time and Power,” he told me "There was hardly anyone by the end of the 19th century who had not sat for their photograph."

In fact, he said, "Let's say that you asked someone if their house was on fire, and they could run in and only retrieve one personal item, what would it be? In the previous 300 years, everyone said ... the family bible. After the 19th century, the answer changed. It became ... the family photo album."

So, how important are our photos? Well, someone gave me a picture that I had never seen before. It was a photo of one of my sons as a baby, and it was like a golden gift from a former time.

Looking back over photography for the consumer, the fifties brought Brownie cameras and the sixties brought color prints. The cameras got smaller and the image quality got better. And everything about the process got cheaper and easier.

The Baby Boomers were the first generation to have every instant of their lives documented for the very first time. Baby’s first tooth, baby’s first step, baby’s first stroller. By the time they started a Baby Boom of their own, it had only gotten easier, and now digital cameras – capable of both still and video – are the order of the day.

So, now we come to that question again -- what if your house caught on fire? Well, there’s been no single family photo album since the end of the 19th century, and you had better have kept your eyes open for the one and only shot. Between the sheer number of photos you have to the huge amount of data which are our digital pictures, who knows where to start.

Leonard Shlain also points out that we live in "a society in which we are awash with images." And that "the books that have really influenced culture, whether it was Plato, or Augustine, or Hegel, or Marx, or Freud, or Aquinas, are all very thick books without any images. Yet, in this century, there have been no books that can compare to the power of the images of the earth being beamed back from space in 1968."

That certainly speaks to the power of image on culture itself, but the power of the images around me in my life and about my life – those powerful series of snaps of the first few minutes of one son’s life, seeing him start out blue as he gulped his first gasp of air. One pink dot on his chest on his chest, spreading outward across his body, until every arm and leg, every finger and toe, was pink, beautifully pink and alive and living.

He’s an adult now, but I have wonderful memories in my mind’s eye of his birth. Yet those memories are different from what I can see in those series of images.

It makes you wonder what grand mysteries of life are readily present in all those photos, so casually tucked away in every closet and drawer and back-shelf of your house.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.