Lines on a Young Lady's Missing Photographs

It is so easy. Too easy. I catch a shard of myself as I am passing by the mirror, and I snap a photo; I am sitting in the yard at the end of the summer, liking the peculiar quality of the light, and I snap a photo; I enjoy the solid proof of my feet stepping on the sidewalk, and I snap a photo.

I am recording, documenting, and classifying my imprints in this world. The archive of me from only the last five years is already towering absurdly over my pre-digital-camera existence. Along with thousands of others who are profiting from the technological and marketing boom of the user-friendly digital camera, I have turned into a mechanical eye insisting on capturing the way life feels from my peculiar perspective so that even when I myself am not in the picture, it is still a record and a testimony of me and my take on the world. It is an extension of my vision which is an extension of my mind, and a physical, public proof that I was here.


But I remember clearly those times when we had no cameras (digital or other) and I can't quite recall what that must have felt like. Not having a daily reaffirmation that "this was a real girl, in a real place/ In every sense empirically true!" must have been perfectly normal. When I look at my photographs, or those of my parents, I can spot a 15-year hole when the pictures of any one of us are a rarity. Towards the end of elementary school, and all through high school and university, I almost don't exist, photographically speaking. The reasons why this was the case don't interest me much (and, in any case, they are clear in my mind which, in a shamelessly Marxist manner, traces the phenomenon in question to the unfavourable financial conditions brought about by the socio-historically induced economic instability....). What fascinates me, though, is a special look we have in the few photos from that period: a look of disarming innocence, vulnerable decency, unassuming awareness of being photographed. When someone took a photo of you, you'd stop your life temporarily, in acknowledgment of the importance and generosity of the photographer's gesture; taking photographs had a certain gravity to it -- it was for "posterity." The meta-moment of photographing liberated you somehow from the roles and pretences you were labouring under in all the other moments, and you became -- beautifully free. My faces in those few photos offer up an uncomplicated modesty I fear I will never have again.

(The outdatedness of those faces "contracts my heart" -- Larkin again -- in almost the same way the mere look at about a dozen letters from my mother does. Letters written during the mentioned socio-historical debacle, letters which I had most certainly read when I received them, but then promptly pushed out of mind. Letters I kept, and carried with me across the ocean, but letters I never want to read again. Letters which, unlike the cosy nostalgia-generating old photos, stick a finger into the eye of a raw grief.)

Now, it's all too easy and more fake with photographs -- at least, in my case. Taking photos isn't about stopping life momentarily, but on the contrary, recording it as it goes. A photo isn't an image any more; it is an atom of a process. It is not trying to find its place in something bigger than itself; it is pointing tirelessly and invariably to itself, period.

And I love it -- this new possibility to duplicate and blow up the minutiae of your life in the virtually continuous present of the photos for no other but their own sake. What I know, though, is that the sensation of being suddenly seized by the plainest sympathy at a single glance at one of those rare old photos is irreplaceable. And what is even beyond irreplaceable, what is truly precious, is the irreducible fullness of life unrecorded in all those missing, never-taken photographs.