It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Today, a cool celebration of life through the eyes of a photographer who faced the potential of an early death.

Caroline Catlin's talk from TEDx, Seattle in 2020, reminds us how powerful photography is in preserving moments of grace and beauty in our lives.

How capturing emotion is a way to prevent grief from swallowing us whole.

You know those awkward icebreaker games?

When everyone goes around and answers something like,

what's your favorite superpower?

When I was a kid, I loved those games.

I believed I had the perfect answer.

People would start sharing and I would wait, bouncing in my seat with excitement.

And when it was my turn, I would proudly tell everyone,

the superpower I want most of all is to see people's emotions in color, hovering in the air around them.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could see how happy a friend was to see you? Like they'd walk in and it would just fill with the color yellow.

Or you could tell when a stranger needed help, you'd pass them on the

street and you'd see this long trail of blue behind them. This was usually the moment where I would

look around at the many blank faces telling me, yet again, my cool superpower, it hadn't landed

well with my fellow fourth graders.

I was an awkward child. That hasn't really changed, and neither has my deep appreciation for the

emotional world around me, or my desire to both witness and capture the elusiveness of feelings.

As I grew older, I started paying attention to the people and the stories I came across,

and I wrote down what I saw. When writing didn't feel like enough, I learned photography,

and I began documenting the moments that felt most precious to me.

With a camera and hand, I learned the art of deciding what to include in the frame and what to let blur into the background.

...