Snapshots

Taking photographs and making pictures has always been a part of my existence. I can still feel myself squinting as a child in the summer sun while Dad took our family portraits, gussied up in our church clothes, sweaty and itchy and feeling as though we had already suffered through enough with being at church all morning in scratchy starchy finery when we could have been playing. Each Christmas time he would take home movies of us hanging up our stockings for Santa, the hot glare of his camera lights burning our retinas while the fireplace was cooking our backsides. My parents both grew up with fathers who were camera buffs, so documenting their lives with snapshots was as much a part of their daily routine as eating and sleeping. Like his father, Dad took photographs too and even made his own prints, first with a makeshift enlarger fashioned out of an old cocktail shaker and later on in a cramped darkroom he built in our basement. Though unconcerned with the technicalities of how the camera worked, Mom was well aware of the magic it could generate. To her, photographs were tangible ‘hard copies’ of time and place and face that you could keep. She selected and preserved them in our family photo albums as devotedly as any medieval monk, knowing that they were her legacy as well as our history. The albums served to trigger memories and tales from the past – our past. Time after time, we would flip through their pages remembering the people and events held fast in them. After my parents’ deaths, the most cherished and difficult items to divide up were the photos. I took custody of them, duplicating each image multiple times so everyone would have a set. Recently I have been creating albums online for our now distant family to enjoy and share anew. Digitalized images are easy to enlarge for aging eyes, revealing details overlooked in those little snapshots we got back from the drugstore and pasted in books or kept in wallets. I have used photos as reference materials for reminiscing, writing and painting ever since grade school, improving my drawing skills by rendering the images over the years when live models were illusive and weather hampered attempts to paint nature in ‘plein air’. The photo was always there, holding still for hours, days, years, while I worked. The living subjects may have grown up, grown old, grown apart, but their images in the photographs are unchanging, captured in time and place for eternity.