I have always loved photographs. Even as a kid, I wanted to record every "special event" and every meaningful person or object in my life. I got my first Kodak camera (the kind that took 110 film) when I was in Elementary School. I took pictures of our dog, my best friend, the basketball backboard my father custom-made for my sister, my parents 1970 Chevrolet station wagon (which would become the first car I learned how to drive many years later), and the great clouds of smoke pouring into the sky as a forest fire burned off in the distance.
When I was in high school, I took pictures of friends and boyfriends, and I took pictures on all of the trips I got to take as a result of being in various extra-curricular activities. I was a "small town girl," so flying to Dallas for a competition was exciting, and I took pictures of the tall buildings in the Big City because they were the first ones I had ever seen up close. I also took a picture of a "Virgin Strawberry Daquiri" because, well, because it was there in front of me, and I wanted to remember that I had ordered it.
In college, I took pictures of new friends, and I also took pictures of places. I was away from home for the first time and found myself wanting pictures of the mesas and canyons of my Hometown--I had come to truly "appreciate" them now that they were part of my past instead of my present. I would go home for Spring Break and Fall Break and various holiday breaks and take pictures of the scenery. I also took a lot of pictures of old houses. My Hometown was mainly post-WWII vintage, but the city of my university had entire neighborhoods of Victorian houses and old churches with stained glass windows and copper shingles. These were things I loved because I had never seen them before, so I took pictures.
My parents always had photo albums in the house, and I kept my photos in albums, too, but my favorite albums were the "old ones" with pictures of my parents as children and distant relatives I had never met living in houses I had never visited. I loved delving into the photo albums that recorded our "baby years." When we would visit my grandparents, I would paw through my grandmother's photo albums, fascinated by the clothes and the cars and the activities. My Grandfather in his Navy uniform, home on Leave because his first child had been born while he was stationed overseas, piloting dirigibles seeking out German submarines lurking in the waters surrounding South America. My mother, wearing Shirley Temple Ringlets in a posed studio shot. My Great Great Aunts standing in front of a WWI-era car, decked out in fur coats and hats featuring a jaunty peacock or pheasant feather. My Great Grandfather, a 32nd Degree Mason, dressed for a parade. The "Baughman Family Estate" lost during the Great Depression that is now the "Firestone Estate" (yes, yes, I could have been an heiress...)
I think it was my Grandmother's Photo Albums that sparked my passion for photographs. Whenever we brought out Photo Albums, stories got told, and I loved the stories. Photographs capture history, style, physical features, a pretty dress, but they also create a "placeholder" for someone who will tell the story behind that photo. Why was it taken? Why did the person taking the picture want to remember that particular day? Whenever we take a picture, we are doing it to record a memory. We are saying to ourselves, "I want to capture THIS moment."
But pictures are nothing without a narrator. It saddens me when I read about people purchasing boxes of "old photographs" at the Garage Sale of a total stranger. To give up your photographs means that you don't know anything about them, and that's why you can choose to part with them. But, to me, that is heartbreaking because the photograph has so much more power when there is someone there to explain it's reason for existence.
I'm not alone in feeling this way. Look at the massive industry "Scrapbooking" has become. You can't just slap your photos into albums anymore--you have to decoratively display them on acid-free paper, and you must, must, MUST include a caption or a poem or some other notation that describes why that picture was taken--why it was important.
My mother died on March 14th, suddenly, from complications of a particularly high-risk surgery she had chosen to undergo in a valiant effort to "buy her more time." Sadly, the surgery only served to cut her life shorter instead of extending it. It has been a very rough month for my sister, my Dad, and me. We struggle with the decision (made collectively as a family) to opt for surgery. We struggle with not being at all prepared for the outcome. We struggle with the vastness and enormity of the tremendous hole that has suddenly been punched into all of our lives.
Since we were the people closest to her (and the people who grieve the most), we were also tasked with the responsibility of "arrangements." Oddly, this was a good thing. It kept us busy. We had things to do, arrangements to make. We had to pick out flowers, design a program for the Memorial Service, select and purchase an Urn for her remains, burn appropriate music onto a CD, write an obituary, plan and prepare food for visitors who would stop by the house after the service...
The list went on and on.
We were also assigned the task of gathering photographs to pin onto two large, fabric-covered bulletin boards that would be posted in the Chapel of the Funeral Home. So, out came the photo albums. My Dad spent an evening scanning photos of my Mom as a baby, a child, a young wife, a young mother, a grandmother. We were actually hard-pressed to come up with a comprehensive collection of her. My mother hated to have her picture taken. Our Baby Albums are filled with pictures of us with our Dad, but there are very few with Mom. She cleverly managed to avoid the camera lens. She coached our softball teams, yet the Team Photo in our albums contains only the faces of the girls--no coach. We were getting frustrated by this--saddened that our mother's "phobia" was now depriving us of something we desperately wanted to find. But, at least we had the Shirley Templesque photo, the high school Graduation Gown photo, the wedding photo, a few "Mom and babies" photos. Finding more recent photos was especially difficult. Her many health issues had caused her to gain significant amounts of weight in recent years, so now she REALLY hated having her picture taken. She would THROW AWAY photos that we sent to her if she was in them and didn't like how "she looked." Not to be thwarted, we scrounged through our own albums and skimmed through the "digital archives" on our computers.
And we found photos--oh yes, there were photos!
The one thing my Mother loved most about her life was being a Grandma. The only recent photos of my Mom always, ALWAYS involved her holding a Grandbaby or--even better--reading a book with a Grandchild. Those photos got taken and were not destroyed--not even by her. Those photos went up on those boards. We were proud of those boards. Through photographs, we captured every stage of her life and showed her engaged in the activities she enjoyed the most--all of her roles as friend, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother.
We somehow managed to survive the Memorial Service last weekend. We were all exhausted, but in a good way because it was "over" and because we got things done and did them in such a way that we think she would have "approved." We were also sad that suddenly we found ourselves with "nothing to do," and that's a bad place to be in when you are grieving.
I went back to work, my kids went back to school, and our lives fell back into their usual routines. But then I picked up my kids from school on Wednesday, and they each had our town's Parks and Recreation Summer Catalog in their backpacks. They both greeted me eagerly, saying, "Mom, Mom! There is a picture of Grandma in here with us!" They were jumping up and down with this weird, bittersweet excitement (because they were "famous" all of a sudden--this particular publication is intended to reach every household in a town with a population of 55,000). Sure enough, I flip through the booklet and find an image of my mother, with my kids, attending an "Art Show" at the Parks and Rec Art Camp my children attended last summer. My Mom was there because the Camp ended at 2:00 pm, and I didn't get home from work until 5:00 pm, so she showed up every day that week to pick up her grandkids because I couldn't be there.
It's not a good photograph. My Mother would have hated it. It wasn't "flattering." As someone who takes a lot of pictures and can be objective, I think it is a crappy photograph for a Parks and Rec publication (you can't see anyone's faces--it's basically a picture of my Mom, turned awkwardly, the back of my daughter's head, and my son with his mouth hanging open while they look at some kid's artwork that isn't particularly spectacular). But, even though it is a crappy photograph, it still spoke volumes to me--it magically-appeared somewhere I would have never expected it to appear, and my Mom's photograph is in that publication because she was doing what she always did--taking care of me and filling in where I could not, and she was smiling because that is exactly where she wanted to be at that moment when that photograph was taken.
I want to tell the 55,000 residents of my city the story behind that photograph.
