Photographs, regardless of their content, tell a story that is unique to the photographer and the subject. We rely so heavily on photographs to capture feelings, moments of beauty, friendships, family moments, and so on and so forth. We post pictures on Facebook, email them across the world to share our moments and memories with others, and we store them so we can look back and remember what we did. I for one, love looking at photos, especially of my family. I love to see family members and how they have changed over the years, the differences in clothing, culture, hair styles; pretty much how everything changes with the passing of time. For me photographs are a way of keeping memories of my younger years fresh, of revisiting former versions of my parents and grandparents, and in some ways, wondering how we got where we are today. I often wonder when looking at pictures what my family was really like when I was younger or before I was even born. The facial expressions in older pictures tell so much about a person that it is sometimes hard to reconcile those images with my memories when I was younger. For most of us, our younger years were filled with mostly fond memories of families, we remember mostly the good times and try to forget about any bad times we had. I have many fond memories from my younger years, but I often wonder what my impression of my parents and grandparents would be like if I had the mentality that I do now when I was younger. For many young children, at least a few decades ago when I was growing up, there was a certain naivete that came with being little. We didn't notice as much about our family around us, rather, we were more self involved, caught up with our excitement about the world and learning about everything around us. We loved our family, but our memories of those years are tilted towards ourselves, not towards the external world and the idiosyncrasies that the adults around us possessed. Pictures, while at times deceiving in how people present themselves, can at the same time be extremely revealing. Emotions, while hidden sometimes beneath a facial facade, present themselves in the way we hold ourselves in pictures, the lines in our faces, the distance between people. Pictures paint a very clear picture of who people are at a specific moment in time. While never all encompassing, they provide us little snippets of a story that we can fill in the blanks with our memories.
Perhaps what I enjoy most about looking at old family pictures, despite simply looking at family, is seeing the transformation that family members go through over time. Some change drastically, others just get older. Yet, through it all, it is the fact that they are family, there is history in the pictures, especially those going back half a century, and I am connected to all of it. I have always loved pictures, but I think I am growing more fond of them as I grow older because they offer a comparison between my son and my younger self along with my wife. The simple fact that our son as changed so much over the past year illustrates the fact that pictures are an important method for preserving our history. When our son was born and for the first year after his birth, people would always say that he either looked my wife, or myself. It would always go back and forth, one week he looked more like my wife, the next he looked more like me. It wasn't until a few months ago that we brought out baby pictures of my wife and I from about the same age he is now, and it is perfectly clear that he contains genes from both of us. There are aspects of both our facial features in him and it is a little uncanny how he looks like both of us. Yet, what else could we expect? It is those pictures of us when we were younger than afford us the ability to see the similarities, to show how family genes are passed down through generations upon generations, tweaked here and there as families combine and create their offspring. One thing I would love to do, if possible, is to get pictures of my parents and grandparents when they were about 2 years old just to see how the faces slowly change over time. Its even more fascinating to me to see how those family members change as they grow up, to see the differences in styles, cultures, and essentially everything about the world the live in. Even looking back at my own pictures from when I was little, so much has changed. My hair styles have changed every few years, never remaining the same for too long, and the craziest is the clothing. To see what I was wearing when I was 7 years old back in the 80's is to take a trip back to a weird era in clothing. I don't really know what happened to clothing in the 80's, but I'm glad it changed.
Who knows what will happen with pictures as we move forward with technology. It seems there are more and more pictures being taken as all we need with us is our phones. Photo albums have moved largely online with everything being supposedly preserved digitally forever. Yet, I still love flipping through those old bulky photo albums, the ones that cataloged vacations, family parties, the start of school every year. Yes, those pictures could be taken out, scanned in, and stored digitally on some hard drive somewhere, but I will always love the hardcover albums. In a way, those albums forced us to consider in more detail what we wanted to preserve about a vacation or birthday party. We had to select the best photos, the ones that best represented to us at the time what our feeling were and how we envisioned each event. Now we can keep everything because thousands of images can be saved in a much smaller space. There are both pluses and minuses in both avenues of persevering our family history and the history of our lives and the people who have come and gone through it. The ones we hold the dearest are the ones that live on in our photos, the perpetual mainstays of our lives. Even when some of those cherished pass on, we still have the photos to remind us of them, to bring them back to life in our minds for a brief period of time, to remind us of who they were and how they lived. Photos do a whole lot more than just preserve images, the perserve our memories, feelings, and emotions and allow us to tap into those anytime we wish to look back and see what our lives were like. I feel it is important to look back every so often and at least take glimpse at your journey to where you are today. So I do every chance I get. I look back at pictures and just remember.
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