What incredible luck we have, to have our photographs.
I write this less than twenty-four hours after the death of one of my great loves.
I am in a mixed state of both shock and grief; devastated by the presence of his absence.
As I lay in bed last night, held awake from my fatigue, I scrolled aimlessly through the galleries on my phone. Looking at pictures that I remembered taking and rediscovering others that I had forgotten about. I needed to see this face that I loved, and I hopelessly wanted the gaze of that face to block the pain of my grief.
This looking really was anything but aimless.
Whether existing as physical printed objects or as digital footprints in our everyday hardware, a photographs potency transforms itself in times of loss. We look upon them as markers of our lives together, a confirmation of our time shared. Seldom thinking about this role photography plays at the time of capturing these moments.
As a photographer I often make pictures with intent. I understand what the concept is and the context where they will inhabit; I curate their purpose and formation. However, like so many of us, I also take photographs carelessly, without thought or reason. The latter method far outweighs the scale of the prior, although at their time of making have a diminished importance, hidden amongst their abundance. Yet I took them and saved them, as though somehow knowing I would need them one day. Now that I have them and not him, they are a treasure to me that they once weren’t.
When making such pictures we become collectors. We consciously, and sometimes subconsciously, pick and choose what we consider notable, what moments are worth collecting. Yet today with the mediums great accessibility we collect such vast numbers of moments that we forget that we have many of them in our possession. Photography’s current stasis of disposability is a blessing and not a dilution of the art form, as many might think. I feel blessed to have the ability to look and to feel backwards, to spend time with pictures that may not hold artistic value or merit but contain precious sentiment and feeling, priceless moments in time frozen within a frame.
Photography in this context is medicinal. Like the jab of a vaccine, the ‘prick’ of looking, as Roland Barthes famously wrote, will hurt. Gradually a healing occurs and that once jarring prick becomes a welcome infusion of warmth and memory. The looking no longer hurts but replenishes.
I can feel it happening now. The more that I look upon them the more I remember the love and the joy that he gave me. I remember our first meeting. I remember how he learned to trust me, and how, for me, it was truly love at first sight. I look and I remember how he made me laugh and worry, how he comforted and annoyed.
It seems an obvious thing, and something that isn’t new when considering the effects photography has on our lives, but my grief, like countless with me, seeks out keys to my memory that no other medium in art or literature can easily unlock, only a photograph carries this power.
The progress of time may dull our grief, but the memory of our past allows us to live forwards.
I am thankful to be a careless picture collector, and grateful that I can look.
