Memory is an unreliable mistress.
What gets stored and how it’s selected is a mystery. And worse, it can be wrong. Skewed from a perspective that doesn’t have context or a type of rigid thinking that can’t yet see the full picture.
My obsession with memory and thus photography started three days before my 6th birthday, when my dad died from cancer.
Losing someone is more than losing the person you knew and loved. It’s also losing the memories they carried. The perspective only they had. The stories they would have told you about yourself when you were old enough to hear them. When someone dies, they take with them a version of you that only they ever held… Which means that version of you dies too. I only recently learned that the recognition of this type of loss is sometimes referred to as losing your “witness.”
As a kid, one of my many dreams was to be an archaeologist. It seemed like a really cool job getting to dig in the dirt… I mean what kid doesn’t like that? In my mind I would find some sick dinosaur bones. But now as an adult I see other reasons why that appealed to me… the idea that the past is still out there somewhere, waiting to be found if you know where to dig. Afterall, those dinosaur books that captured my imagination weren’t written from the memory of a human being’s experience with dinosaurs.
My life experiences over the years have taught me that physical things hold history in a way that memory can’t. They don’t rewrite themselves to protect you from something hard or get stored in your nervous system responses. They just exist, unchanged, while you keep growing into someone with more context to read and understand them.
I have a stack of photographs with my dad in them, some digitized home movies and a few other physical items from things he made. None of it is enough but all of it is everything. And every time I’ve returned to open that can of historical worms throughout my life, I have found something I didn’t notice before. Some little bit of context that provided additional meaning.
As a child you look for yourself in the remnants of life that you hold onto. You look for proof of your existence and that you were loved. As you get older you stop being the center of attention and you start noticing the background. The subtext. Who was holding the camera? Who was writing the letters? Who was narrating the whole thing from just outside the edges of the story? Why did they take this photo? Your questions change and what you notice changes with it. That’s the natural evolution of growing up.
A few months ago I did an exercise where I had to think of a photo that had meaning to me. After picturing it, I was asked questions about the quality of the photo and how perfectly it was composed. And I smile writing this because it’s not any of those things. It was taken on a disposable film camera from the 80’s, the flash was too strong, the focus is off, and it was probably developed at Wal-Mart… but it’s one of my favorite photos of me and my dad.
My dad was a complicated person, like most people, and he wasn’t perfect. Our life wasn’t perfect either and only got harder after his diagnosis, but this photo showed me that there were still moments of happiness even if I didn’t remember them. This wasn’t a manufactured moment created by a photographer who was paid to get someone’s kids to smile… this was just a day at our home and a moment where my mom got the camera out while we were playing. I can’t even see his full face, but somehow I still feel his love when I look at this photo.
I take photos to show the happiness that already exists inside your perfectly imperfect life. Not to create the illusion of one. I’m taking photos for your kids, because I know first hand what it means to go looking for answers and have no one to ask. All of these moments of happiness, ease, contentment and love are worth preserving because they exist alongside everything else… not in spite of it. Your life doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth remembering.
