Growing up, everywhere we went, no matter the occasion, my mom carried her camera, ready to take our picture and capture the moment into an image. As kids, and even sometimes today, my family and I are quick to complain and make faces when my mother yells, “Hold on!” and reaches for her camera bag. However, no matter how much we hate stopping and posing in that moment, my family and I now recognize the importance of pictures in the preservation of our memories.
Pictures are not just meaningless images on a piece of paper, or preserved on social media, to me they are often physical representations of what is important to me. In my family, pictures play a large role in bringing us together to reminisce about happy times and laugh at one another. Many points throughout the year, I like to scroll through my mom’s photos and laugh at all the funny poses she captures of us. It helps us bond as a family, and reminds us of the feelings and emotions of the day preserved in film. To a stranger, the pictures of my family’s vacation would be meaningless, but to me they are a reminder of the individual instances we experienced together, the things we said, did, and experienced that day all come rushing back just by looking at these images. I value these reminders more than anything else.
More than that, the older pictures that my Nana has allows me to learn about my family and my personal history. Through my Nana’s photo albums, and the explanation she gives with each picture, I have been able to learn all about her sisters, who all had died well before I was born, and about my mother’s childhood. This gave me a rare glimpse into a life well before my own, and gave me a closer connection to my family. I hope one day someone in my family will have the same experiences looking at pictures from my family albums.
While I do love photos and their ability to preserve, I also hate our generations’ obsessive need to document every moment and experience on social media. While it is amazing to be able to share pictures, and by proxy experiences, a consequence of that is we become so focused on documenting the moment that we let it slip by without truly experiencing it. Pausing for pictures is one thing, but centering your life, your experience on saving every moment will prevent you from enjoying it. A problem for our generation is that because we have all these wonderful powers of preservation and expression, we become afraid of forgetting, afraid of having no proof or way to remember what we have experienced. Consumed by that fear, we have taken to counteracting that fear by doing whatever we can to preserve every moment.
Now, as I have said before, I love pictures and I will never stop taking them. They are an important way for me to relive memories. However, I refuse to let my life be dictated by pictures. While they can be important pieces of our history, they are only glimpses, not the real thing. In order to be able to live my life happily, I have to have faith that I will remember the important moments of my life, even without a reminder.
