Donna Ashworth once wrote a poem about what it means to be the self-designated ‘taker of photos’ in a family.
To be the person who is always behind the camera, and who’s solely to thank for every album, photo book and Snapfish fridge magnet that’s ever come into being.
Donna correctly points out, that it’s not always easy being the person who ‘disrupts the moments to capture them.’
It demands audacity, as photo-taking is often at odds with people-pleasing. I would attest to this challenge, but also trump the difficulty of all those obligatory sighs, eye rolls and exclamations of' 'oh no, not her with the camera again!' , with the far-worse down-side of never actually being IN a photo.
This reality cuts particularly deep, and especially in the realms of ‘firsts photos.’ Those photos which are made precious by qualities that only retrospection can afford.
They include:
The first hours
The first steps
First holidays
The sting of not having hospital photos with my newborn babies, and being demonstrably absent from all the sandcastle-building beach snaps from their first years, isn’t an issue rooted as much in vanity, as it is in sadness.
Sadness that the evidence doesn't do my omni-presence justice, nor does it provide my children with sufficient proof of the awe and wonder I felt towards them, and which might offer comfort and meaning to them when they are adults.
For this reason, whenever my husband is scrolling through his camera roll (as we both quite often do in the evening, united in our nostalgia) and happens across a photo like this one (above), I feel something closely resembling… relief!
A bit like unexpectedly finding some long-lost treasure, it’s a feeling that we mothers - the great un-photographed - are united in our experience of.
(For context, this particular photo was taken in Cornwall on our honeymoon. I had gone into the garden to squeeze in a little workout - an ambitious attempt to temper the exhaustion of the relentless night-feeds and frayed nerves.)
When a photo is the only enduring evidence of a time, place or mindset that has long since been consigned to history - forgotten, buried or rose-tinted in the mists of time - it can prove particularly evocative.
It’s as though all the emotions that abounded in that particular moment, have been regurgitated via the medium of paper and ink.
I’m not exactly sure why, but there is something as well, about seeing our younger selves through older, wiser and kinder eyes, that is both heartening and life-affirming, in equal measure.
‘It’s just a photo!’ some might say, and to a degree this might be true, but what this photo also is is a yardstick.
A way of reconciling not just the passage of time, and the finitude of all circumstance… but also the joy that underscores even those most challenging, sleep-deprived and emotionally-fraught chapters in life.
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