Photography: A Cruel, Ironical Art

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography.  The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after.  Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”

This quote comes from The House at Riverton by Kate Morton.

An excellent book.  And a book in which the heroine just happened to express this tantalizing opinion about photography.  This passage occurs near the end of her life when she unexpectedly comes across some photos that bring up memories that might not be welcome.

I don’t agree with her, by the way.  Do I even need to say that?

But, that passage did make me think. Do we as photographers have an obligation to the future?  Our photos are, in essence, dialogues with those that will look at them later.

Note that I said dialogues, not monologues.  Those that look at our photos down the road are going to react to what we communicate in our photography.  Do we need to think about which reactions our photos will cause in the viewers after “their future weighed them down?”  Is that part of the dialogue?

The easy answer is that we are obligated to record memories for our families, or our clients’ families.  And yes.  That is so important.  I want my kids and their kids to know what their young lives were like, what their homes were like, their schools, and even what my husband and I were like when we were younger.

But do we have obligations to the future that go beyond that?

I have no photographs today in this post about photography.  But I’m going to describe one to you that is sitting on my bookshelf.  Try to picture it:

My first child was born 5 weeks early.  Tiny, but perfectly healthy with no extra time required in the hospital.

My dad, who lived out of state, was only able to be with us that day because he was undergoing cancer treatment in a hospital not too far away.  We have some very sweet pictures of him holding her just a few hours after she was born.

Four weeks later, he was back at home and we got the call.  The get here quick call.

We drove 8 hours to the hospital, and with the help of an amazing nurse snuck the baby into the ICU.  She took a snapshot of my dad holding my newborn one last time.  And, angel that she was, that nurse brought the photo back up to the hospital the day my dad died, which was her day off.

We buried him on my daughter’s due date.

Now, to me, this is a beautiful story and I don’t want to make anyone sad by reading it.  My child was meant to arrive early in perfect health.  Otherwise, my father would never have met her, and I wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye to him or even attend his funeral.

But the photo – the one that’s not in this post.  It is one of my most prized possessions.  And it’s beautiful.  In spite of the fact that my dad, covered in tubes and tape, looked miserable and the baby was red and blotchy.  It shows the love he had for that baby, the pain he went through just to kiss her.  And that makes me happy (and sad) every time I see it.

He wouldn’t have wanted the world to see that photo.  So that’s an obligation that I honor.  An obligation to the past.  But I wonder now, how will my daughter feel when she looks at this photo 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or 50 years from now.  She won’t be able to imagine what he was like or know how much he loved us.  Will she see the beauty in it?

Or will the events of her life have weighed down on her in such a way that the pain is more apparent than the beauty?  Will she know her own ending?  Or mine?

So, I’m feeling philosophical, as you can tell.  And it’s the philosopher’s prerogative to say that there is no easy answer to the question at hand.

But, I think that this is what I would say.  Our obligation is to record life.  It’s ups and downs, its messiness and moods, its pains and beauties.

That photo of my dad might hurt my daughter in ways that I can’t imagine years from now.  And it might help her too, if only because it’s a reminder of love and life and priorities.

For my part in the dialog with my daughter’s future self, I want to say, “This is life.  You have no photos of a super-staged perfectly clean house managed by a supermom.  You have photos of messes and fun, crying babies and cuddling children, and a dying grandfather.  You are going to have supreme joys and deep lows.  And wherever you are on this journey, may these photos give you the strength or the beauty or the love that you need at that moment.

So I think I’ll end by repeating part of the quote from above:

“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”

I believe that the beauty of photography is that is does force us to see people without the weight of the future.  Because our endings can only be enriched by knowing our beginnings and middles.

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