Picturing our memories

My 30-something-year-old nephew grew up in Illinois and Colorado, a distant relative of our 1980’s nuclear family. Given family finances, we visited him for a week or so every couple of years. Recently, when he returned to New York, he moved me to tears as I realized how our mutual history is forever bound in family photographs.

In a society that can instantly capture a photographic image, use it incriminatingly, Photoshop it unmercifully and tag it indiscriminately, I think I’d appreciate a little more “photo respect”.  That is, placing images in context and uncovering the story behind the pictures - the process of being there, not just “almost being” there.

To explain, after I packed fifty years of my parents’ lives into boxes and neatly shipped them to Long Island, I found that my mother had carefully stored every picture she had ever received from me and my brother in acid-laden photo sheets. Without realizing it, she chronicled all the children and grandchildren moments that took place sometimes thousands of miles from her home. This was not a sorrowful discovery.

Photos we all take and savor as parents - first haircut, decorated birthday cakes, the moving day van - they were all there, carefully treasured by a doting Grandma. We couldn’t get back the time missed due to fate or circumstance, but when I sat with my nephew, remembering the first time I saw these snapshots and the captions dutifully written by his mother on the back, he proceeded to fill in the locations and the joyful recollections of his youth and I reciprocated with the stories of the pictures of his parents - younger, thinner, with dark hair and less wrinkles.  We reveled in these captured moments, and I realized their importance in our shared lives.

What’s so rough is when there is so much physical distance between grandparents, parents, children and extended family these days our photos do not record moments together, but act as substitutes for “almost being there”. 

We seem to accept not having the real experiences, but the vicarious ones we witness in Facebook albums and cell phone memory chips. 

There’s nothing wrong with the sharing, but when I can’t correct the distance between us in miles, I’ve come to realize, I can always work to place these images in a perspective we can meaningfully share.

So, now every time I look at a photograph, I see the circumstances surrounding it. I see the many remarkable moments were captured under duress (squirmy kids, annoyed teenagers, petulant adults). I see the many snapshots I knew had potential as I squeezed the shutter. I see how many “got away” or worse, couldn’t be recovered once a generation was gone.

There’s something to be said for the precious finality of film - or pixels. So these days, I often take a moment to study the emotion as much as the image because sometimes the miracle of the photograph is what it doesn’t show what needs a voice to explain and uncover.