I have a picture of my mom. It was taken when she was a young girl, maybe six or seven years old. I captured the photo during a Thanksgiving celebration with my second cousins with my phone camera, because the cousin who owned it didn’t want to give it away. Without being asked she pointedly said, “I’m not going to give you this picture”. I think she felt an attachment to this image of her childhood – to a time when life was secure and carefree – as she gazed at those depictions of her youth.
It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, when we gaze at photos from a time past, remembering what was before and what was after that frozen moment. Lost memories resurface and forgotten emotions are conjured with the visual stimulation of the frozen moment. During youth, we may look back on photos and remember a lost toy or a favorite shirt accompanied by the emotions we were attached to at that time. After experiencing transformative life events, we may compare ourselves, whether by appearance or success – what and who we were then and who and what we are now. The same photo can hold distinct sentimental meaning depending on the life events we have experienced or are currently experiencing. Like this photo of my mom. My reaction would likely have been muted if I were not a mother.
I have a picture of my mom. She is smiling her thousand watt smile, emanating pure childhood joy; a smile she continues to possess in her seventies. I saw my mom through a mother’s eyes, wanting to protect this little girl as if she were my own – shielding her from the reality and horrors adulthood embodies. My maternal instincts threw me down a pictorial journey that superimposed my position as her daughter with overlapping memories of her being my daughter and her being my mom, converging our maternal experiences. It was like a funhouse mirror that altered space, time, and reality. It was the first time I genuinely saw my mom as an individual – a person with a life containing memories of a childhood filled with youthful resilience and foundering naivete from navigating an ever changing world.
A photo is a narrative, a story. Inherently it is not a novel thought or idea, but it doesn’t hurt to sit with concepts taken for granted, reconnecting our emotional understanding of past events. The interpretation of a photo can be fictional or fixed in historical reality. Pictures can document actual events of actual people – a literal depiction based on visual clues and historical context. Take for instance a photo of five women posing in some sort of order on a sunny day from the 1940s. Using the photo’s clues we can surmise the women are most likely sisters or related because they have similar features; the photo is old due to its quality; its sunny because of the subjects’ squinting eyes; and the era of the 1940s deduced by the clothing donned by the women and the clothesline in the background. This same photo can inspire the creative, filling the narrative gap of what came before and after, a narrative that can span five minutes or five years. A narrative subjective to the viewer’s understanding of the world.
I have a picture of my mom. A photograph that tells a story of childhood and joy. A story that spans generations of women. A little girl with dark, untamed tresses with micro bangs, and a thousand watt smile standing with her cousin of fair hair in adult-sized dresses. If you listen, you can hear the giggling of the small girls as they don “grown up” clothes in play, imagining smells of wood and polish from the midcentury furniture, conjuring memories not yet lived by future generations. As the camera shutter clicks, you can feel the burn and sting of the camera flash on your eyes as the person behind the camera presses the shutter button to freeze this pure unadulterated joyous moment in eternity.
Leave a comment