say cheese

Last night as I was laying in bed, waiting for sleep to fall as heavily over me as my thick blue quilt had, I was considering life without photography.

Big deal, right? Of what do I ever take pictures that matters, that really matters... not those half eaten pieces of pie at the end of a fancy meal, not interesting ceilings in accidentally visited houses or random birds visiting my porch, not even candid moments or impromptu get-togethers with friends whose faces I see every day. Those pictures, once taken, are never looked at again. Not really, anyway, unless a particularly special person or moment is captured. The problem is that you don't know when you're taking the photos which will turn out to be treasured and which will just go in a file on the desktop under the name "random photos."

I have a picture of my grandfather that I cherish. I don't have the negative, so you can bet if my house caught on fire, I'd have Bub under one arm and that picture frame in the other. (My husband can handle the cat.) I was five, it was my fifth birthday party, and he's reaching over me, bending down and grabbing my knees to tickle me. He used to tickle me all the time, chase me, and grab at my knees, calling it "how a mule eats corn." When I got older, it turned into a poke in the ribs. He was so tall, 6'4" at least, and you can tell in this picture. You can still see some youth in his face, his already balding head still brown-black and not yet gray, his arms and hands strong and muscular, like those of a man who did everything for himself.

My memory is spotty, as I've said before, so this photo of him means the world to me. There are others of him, of course, but this is the two of us together doing something that only the two of us did. The casual laugh on his face and the squeal of both delight and terror on mine embody everything we were to each other-- he adored me, and I revered him.

What would life have been like before photography? You'd never know what you looked like as a child. If you were like me and forget faces, you wouldn't remember your loved ones faces after they'd gone, and you wouldn't remember the faces of your children after they'd grown. When you met your future spouse, you wouldn't know what they were like as a child and hence what your children could possibly look like, like the white-blond toddler hair of my brunette husband. I didn't believe him until he showed me the photo. There would be no record of your face after you were gone, and probably very little record of your life. Yes, there were paintings, but only the rich had those, and they're usually a poor imitation of reality. All sense of the past would be fleeting and changeable, moldable like wet clay under time's hands. You'd have no record of past events, all you'd have is your memory, and for those of us who rely so heavily on pictures now (all of us), we'd find that very difficult.

In the early days of photography, when you got one, maybe two, pictures of yourself total in your lifetime-- can you imagine that pressure? Blink or smirk when that powder ignites and you're blinking or smirking for eternity. No one would ever remember you looked any different.

My grandmother had a little sister die of cholera, I believe, at a very young age. The only photo they have of her is after she's already passed, being held up by my grandmother and her little brother. My great-grandmother had a large version, a foot tall at least, of this photo hanging in her hall, but I didn't know until I was 15 or so that my great-aunt was dead in it. Terrible-- I can't imagine being my great-grandmother and walking past this every day knowing this was the only way I'd see my child for the rest of my life. These days, by age three there's so many photos of most children you'd think they're all celebrities. I get emails and facebook updates daily with new photos of my friends and their kids, even videos from France and snapshots from London and Vienna.

All this was going through my mind as I tried to find sleep last night, leading me into dreams I can no longer remember. Maybe one day they'll make some sort of an internal mind camera. Then I could record everything I see, in front of or behind my eyes. You never know-- it was just a hundred and fifty or so years ago that modern photography began.