Snapshots

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
- William Gibson, "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)"

I am down in the basement, sorting through the vast stock of photographs left behind by my mother. I can't keep them all. I can't, there are too many, some day it will by son sitting here, where I am sitting, and I can't leave this to him. We are leaving so damn much to everyone his age. At least this pile of paper I can take responsibility for.

But then, I wince at the idea of throwing them away. Each of these is a moment of someone's existence. Can I really just discard that? Like it never mattered?

The idea of digitizing them occurs to me, but that's just trading one problem for another. Instead of a shelf of boxes for my descendants to find, endless folders on a hard drive.

No, no I think the only option is to try to curate them, make some of them into something. Try to compose them into something worthy of a few moments of attention again.

Ok.

Ok let's try.

I have no idea who these people are. I honestly think that's part of the appeal. It's a moment, dropped out of nowhere, in an archaic and faded black and white. Her look of surprise seems bigger, more animated for being slightly out of focus. His look of tired resignation as well.

There is no annotation. I spend almost an hour googling for some clue about the mark on the back, the aspect ratio, the size. Nothing.

Who are they? What's happening? The emotion is so clear, but everything else is just a blur. Its remarkable how cleanly the signal of feeling cuts across the noise, from these strangers to me. The image is hazy as someone else's memory. Which it is. At yet, here it is.

This one is labeled in my mother's neat hand, but I don't recognize most of the names. I love how the woman walking into frame from the right looks slightly surprised to be on camera, still, all these years later, caught in mid-stride. The men behind her are oblivious, to her to the camera to everything. Is he knitting? I think he's knitting?

I wish I could ask mom about that.

The candidness of it is what speaks to me. A moment out of time. Fixed by the mechanism, preserved (at least until, mournfully, someone puts it in a landfill because no one has time to remember everyone in the world's memories).

I took this to my campus library to digitize with a flatbed scanner there. The image I got back had small rows of dots running across it horizontally. Some kind of scanline artifact, I thought, so when I got home I tried to capture a better image by setting my full-frame mirrorless camera up on a tripod with a studio-grade macro prime lens and shooting these old photos with that.

When I looked at the beautiful, high resolution, screamingly sharp digital renderings of these ancient analog prints this produced, I discovered the "artifacts" were on the surface of the paper, tiny hexagons impressed across the print. Google tells me this is a "silk finish" Kodak was fond of in the 70s.

The medium is the message.

This one starts to have a story. Its the photo-bomber on the lower left that drew me in. She could be on instagram today. But then the couple in the background... what's going on there? She looks so tender and he looks very far away from her. His shirt is olive drab, the buttons are black. Army issue? A fashion affectation, or did he serve?

There are so many narratives one wants to make out of this. I recognize her name in my mother's annotation, but not his. He is not the man she would later marry (a scroll through my email records finds me a time when we corresponded during my mother's illness and confirms her husband's name). Are we watching the breakup of a couple? A mismatched friendship? After noticing the shirt, I wondered if he had been drafted, but it's 1972 and the US was mostly out of Vietnam by then (Wikipedia tells me).

That's my father on the left. The first indication in this album of my eventual existence.

There are three cameras in this scene, the one taking the picture, the one being held by the man in blue on the right, and one on the table.

Already, in 1977, there were at least three photographic records of this event. Three albums in three other basements, to be found by some other adult children. Someone thinking, "well the woman in the red scarf is mom, but I don't know who that guy with the mustache is."

Today of course, everyone has a camera at all times. Every moment is recorded photographically from every angle. Oddly, if you carry around a purpose-built camera, people seem uncomfortable about it. Which I found odd, but now I think I understand. If you capture with a smartphone you are just a fellow community member recording a prosthetic memory. To carry a dedicated camera is to declare one's intention to turn people into Art and people don't like that.

Of course, that's also what I'm trying to do now, isn't it?

There are more. So many more. More even that I digitized. I realize now, even some of these darlings I must murder.

Information is so abundant, and attention so scarce, here we all are. Living in world of shared memory too big to grasp. Emails in the spam folder, photo albums in the dustbin, nothing to be done for it.

Is it any wonder we want to feed it all to machine minds that promise to make some sense out of it? Some sense that is not art? That they will explain to us Like We Are Five?

A coda: this was in the bottom of the box with that photo album, an artifact from the distant future, from the perspective of those Christmas party 1972 participants. From the distant past, from mine:

On the front, an advertisement for the High School Musical I worked on as a AV Club member Sophomore year. On the back, a note that might be in my father's handwriting, giving the model number and price of my first SLR.

The art teacher who taught me photography was also the drama coach. They must have asked her what to buy at the show.

And so now, in middle age, I own a camera that can do remarkable things. Did you know a modern mirrorless camera can take bursts of continuous images? Mine will fire at twenty frames per second! Twenty frames! Per second! Each of which takes more than a second just to glance at and check for focus!

And I carry it with me, everywhere, capturing images and posting them on the Internet.

Where mostly no one sees them, because how could they, because everyone else is doing the same damn thing.

But I do it anyway.

Because memory is all we have of our moments in the end.

And sharing them is the only boat from the sinking ship of the self, leaky and flimsy and crowded as it may be.