Take pictures of everything and everyone all the time (07/28/03)

Be sure to take lots of pictures. I tell this to my daughter when she talks about something cute her niece has done. I tell this to my co-worker when she talks about her upcoming trip to Germany. I tell this to my mother when she has a flower that is in bloom for the first time.

Take lots of pictures. We do. I found one source, a market research firm called International Data Corporation, that stated that more than 540 million rolls of film are processed every year. That is more than one million rolls per week. That’s a lot of pictures.

What is there that compels us to capture a moment in time? It started way before 1888 when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera in order to make the art of photography available to the masses. It started long before Daguerre and his Daguerreotypes and even before Niépce first captured an image using material that hardened with exposure to light way back in 1827.

We have been recording moments in time since the days of the cave paintings and probably before that. Can you imagine the digital photographs that are currently so popular surviving as long as an Aboriginal hand print on a shrine in Australia?

All the pictures we snap serve to bring us closer to one another. We send images flying through space so that our friends and families may see for themselves just how cute our children are. We treasure photographs of long-lost relatives, searching for a connection to our past in yellowing prints.

All this picture-taking presents us with a problem. What are we to do with all of them? Do we keep the portraits of other people’s pets? What happens to our collections after we die? There are boxes and boxes of memories. The problem is that the only one who actually knew who these people were can’t tell us any more.

I have made an effort to tuck away in albums the many photos I have. I have tried to label them with the names of everybody, even who belongs to that disembodied knee in the corner. I congratulate myself of finally having all the pictures filed when I find yet another box of vacation shots that I haven’t the foggiest idea of where the pictures were taken or why.

I recently put together a mini album for my daughter’s birthday. I printed out a photo of her for each year she had been alive. I was in a panic when I realized there were three years I couldn’t find. I finally found the missing ones hiding with a stack of prints yet to be filed.

I have entire years where the only photographs I have of her are ones where she is sticking her tongue out at me. I have others, taken months apart, where she is wearing the same dress that she insisted on wearing nearly every day for a year.

What I don’t have are the pictures of everyday life. Well … maybe a few. I do have a picture of her inside the kitchen cabinet and one of her drinking out of a hose. But I have none of the many tea parties, none of the constant sleepovers, none of the important stuff.

I have no good pictures of my mother. The only ones I have of her are posed. I have no pictures of any of my other relatives doing anything other than staring into the camera.

Take lots of pictures, but be sure to include the unposed shots of people being themselves. Those will be the most precious of all.[[In-content Ad]]