Pictures
”A picture is a poem without words.” -Horace.
Growing up, there were four or five photo albums that sat on our bookshelf in the living room. My parents weren’t avid readers: they had a large concordance of the Bible, an equally proportionate version of the Bible, and a couple of other big books that I can’t remember. The family albums were slotted in the shelves beside these books, along with each school yearbook that my brother and I collected as we progressed the grade levels. The other shelves were used to house pictures in standing frames, Dad’s wallet and change he placed in a bronze dish, and a small artificial plant.
We had memorable photo albums. They were bound in a blanket-like material. It was like touching a sense of security and warmth. These covers were handmade either by someone in our family or someone who knew the value of a photo album and what was about to be placed in one.
The albums were fairly heavy for a young kid like me who needed a chair to get them off the top shelf of the bookcase. I’d have to inch them off slowly and tilt them toward me, ready to brace the fall of each one into my arms. Recollections of the past are meant to be done with caution after all.
I’d open one of the albums and immediately be taken back to a time before. Each picture represented someone in our immediate or extended family. There are pictures of holidays such as Christmas, my brother and I opening our gifts supplied by Santa Claus. There are other pictures of us posing as a family, dressed up and ready to go somewhere (most likely to a church service).
I remember one picture of my brother, my dad, and I standing on the porch of our first home. My brother and I were little. I was maybe seven years old, my brother is three years old. My dad was crouched down beside us and he had one arm wrapped around each of us. My brother and I were smiling, likely being goofy. But my dad wasn’t. He had this stoic look on his face that when you looked at him in the picture, it was almost like he was getting ready to protect us from something.
I can only imagine what goes through a father’s mind when he has two young boys that will grow up into a topsy-turvy world.
I think of those old photo albums from time to time, and the hundreds of stories that lie within them. Photo albums, especially family albums, tell us that we came from somewhere and that before we became doctors and lawyers and teachers and businessmen and musicians and clergy, we were young kids playing with our dogs, building snowmen, stuffing our faces with birthday cake, and being part of someone else’s story while simultaneously starting our own.
Those old albums have raw, unfiltered emotion. They tell the good and the not-so-good stories.
My wife has some emotionally unfiltered pictures in her own albums. In one picture, she is somewhere around the age of 6 and out on a boat with family and enjoying the lake. She is pouting and angry for some reason. In the next picture, she is smiling widely like there was nothing that had ever happened. The camera captured both of these unfiltered emotions, showing the reality of a person’s life.
Today, you don’t get that with the mass of photos we process on a daily basis. Social media captures moments in our lives, but they capture every moment of our lives. And when every moment is captured, nothing is considered special. Our special moments get diluted and uploaded into the ether, rarely to be thought of again until they are unearthed by a photo stalker looking to make a silly comment and cause embarrassment.
Speaking of comments, there is an unspoken pressure to appear witty and clever to those that follow you. You can’t upload and let the picture speak for itself if you want to gain more ‘likes.’ You must be relevant and funny because that’s what culture has deemed as ‘like-worthy.’
I can’t speak for everyone else, but there were no captions written in permanent marker in our albums. We were left to be who we were and who we would grow up to be. Those pictures forced us to recall the memories of a family vacation or a trip to the carnival or a proud academic accomplishment. And with those memories came stories. I found that the ones where I couldn’t recall the stories made me wish I could. They also gave me the freedom to fill in the story as context provided.
There’s the cliche, ”A picture is worth a thousand words." I wonder if we have meaningful words to give our pictures of today? I wonder if we are vulnerable enough to be raw and real--to live unfiltered.
