I had an opportunity today to go through our photo albums and it was a very interesting activity. Admittedly I am not really a photo person and I don’t usually look through the albums often. Still I am finding that it was a rewarding experience.
Step-daughter M had asked for some photos of herself and her father when she was young, and also some pictures of her father and I so that she could add them to a photo-wall she was creating in her house. That task was both easy and difficult. I have pictures of her dad as a child and young adult and those were easily scanned into the computer for later printing. I also have an album of pictures of the children when they were small, thoughtfully put together by M herself as a birthday gift to her dad, when at some point she realized that most of the photos had migrated with her mother at the great divorcement.
Pictures of her father and I together was a more complicated issue however and this required extensive poring over the albums. Basically I am not a taker of photographs. I have been on occasion. G bought me a pocket sized camera soon after we were married and I dutifully carried it on trips and, under his encouragement, took pictures, usually because he was taking pictures too. G was something of an amateur photographer. Actually I got rather good. But I don’t automatically think of taking pictures without encouragement, or without being under the tutelage of another photographer.
Even with two photographers there are few pictures of either one of us. Neither G nor I are particularly eager photographic subjects. There are more photos of me, primarily because G took far more pictures than I, lugging large cameras and lenses on all trips. But G was mostly a photographer of landscapes and things, not people, and I shared some of the same propensities.
I loved looking through the photos of our trips and our days. It has been very evocative, a trip down memory lane it is true, but some things have reminded me of things about myself I have forgotten. Sometimes there would be just a page of pictures of the trees at home on a given day — those would be my photographs — whereas G would take wonderfully detailed pictures of scenery and architecture on our trips. Looking at our pictures, even when there is nary a person in any one, reminds me of so much about who we were in those days.
But after about 2000 the pictures drop off. G stopped carrying his camera and photographic duty more and more often fell to me. I would take the pictures when I thought about it, or when pressed, which wasn’t very often. Then when I had a digital camera I would upload them to the computer and never print them out. I still rarely take pictures unless I need a photo for a blog post or to record something in the garden journal. When I am someplace or doing something with friends, I am usually too busy being there, in that time and place, to step out of the picture and think about recording the image.
So what happened? Will there be photos of our future, or will there be only a 20 year snapshot of a portion of our lives? I don’t know.
I doubt I will become a photographer. I am not sure that I have the temperament. And unfortunately G’s photography days may be short lived. He was having increasing difficulties making the camera work, even though he had operated a camera for years. He was having increasingly difficulty getting chemicals to mix correctly, and the dark room was becoming a place of frustration. It is easier to find excuses than admit that he is failing, that he can’t do it anymore. He would never use a point and shoot camera. He would feel that if he couldn’t control every aspect of the shot it wasn’t worth doing.
And you know, it is OK with me.