So the reason for the last post is this picture. Andy has a computer hooked up to our TV and I don’t really understand it except that I know it requires a web of wires behind our TV stand that are completely disorganized and that I hate, and that normally I can’t do to the TV what I want to do to the TV, in which case I just hit “help” over and over and over on our universal remote until I can get Little Bear to play for three screaming children.
Anyhow, when the TV is dormant for some period of time all our digital pictures (and I mean all, including the one of me drinking my third or fourth cosmo underneath our ping pong table at a summer party at our old house before kids) comes up in the form of a screensaver. It’s actually pretty awesome (until said picture shows up for all family to see) … it’s like a digital photo album you just sit and watch—the kids, in particular, love it.
Tonight, after catching up on Breaking Bad, the above picture came up. I love it. I do not remember it. And for good reason … it was taken May 31, 12 days after the boys were born. I was so sleep deprived and worried about the health of my too-small boys that I don’t remember much from that time, sadly. But then I have this, this unexpected gift. This picture I don’t remember taking (maybe I didn’t), a moment I don’t remember being a part of (maybe I wasn’t), a time that has slipped away but yet I still have a glimpse of it.
I love photography.
And, I suppose, I have to admit to loving technology, too. Because even though I spend way too much time hitting “help” on our TV remote (daily), I’m gifted this—glimpses of moments in time tucked so far away in my brain I know I wouldn’t remember them if not for a bunch of pixels coming together for my benefit.
People talk about house fires and that the lives in those homes are all that matter. I agree. Of course I agree. But if I lost my pictures … I probably wouldn’t. At least the digital ones. They’re probably somewhere safe out there in Internet land and if my house burned down and I hit “help” enough (or Andy took over the situation), they would come back to me. But then there are all of my older ones, disorganized, in shoe boxes, but still very much loved. Because they’re not just pictures. But the moments I don’t—can’t—remember thanks to all the mundane/wonderful life stuff occupying my brain.
And more often than not, those unexpected pictures—moments—can do wonders for my mood, my memory, my brain, my appreciation of all things life … even those moments of life not previously remembered.
“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” —Ansel Adams
