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The Ghost in the Image: Photography & Memory
Photography recaptures the past more effectively than a videocamera ever can or will. It's a sort of magical recapturing, not only of the moment, but of what preceded and followed it. And if the photographer is long gone, of the world as it presented itself to that person.
I have a lot of photographs of my late husband Don and my first husband, whom I divorced when I was 30. I was going through a trunk and ended up looking through a pile of them.
I contend---and I know most people would disagree with me----that a photograph is a far more evocative and powerful aid to memory than a videotape. To me, a videotape is as puzzling and unrevealing as reality itself as it unscrolls before you. It’s also equally random. Here, a beloved and usually cheerful sister-in-law sits in a porch swing, wearing a brooding expression and looking pointedly away from the inquisitive lens. There my mother---a natural star----plays to the camera, waving, calling out, smiling. The children, always eager to be the center of things, dress up in costumes, chatter, and perform. My brother, never what you’d call the social type, scowls and moves out of range. The lens moves over and away from things. It’s always on the move. And like Heisenberg’s observer, it alters the reality into which it intrudes. People become conscious of themselves and stay conscious.
But a photograph that I’ve taken myself is a sort of node or gateway back into the layers of my own memory. There was a moment before and after. There were events that surrounded those moments. It happened quickly, before people could arrange their faces, their clothing, their posture.
It’s true that most of them aren’t of people looking sad. I was always a polite photographer. But there are photographs of people shortly after they looked that way. There are a couple of photographs of people taken days or weeks before they died. In the pictures, their image stays with me and it stays still. Why did I not notice how old my late husband (only 55) had suddenly started to look before the aneurysm? In the photographs, you can see a change in him, as if his body had got the message weeks before the event. This irrepressible and charismatic man who in earlier photographs was invariably joyous and smiling, suddenly looks haggard, unsure, bereft. Why? By which I mean, why did I not see this? In the photographs of a family party shortly before the event, he’s smiling, but the smile doesn’t go all the way to his eyes. His eyes are remote. In all the photographs, he’s already not quite there with the rest of us.
When I look into the pictures of the past, I can remember every single thing that preceded and followed it---not how things looked so much as how they felt. Many of the memories are ambivalent, mixing up happiness and the reverse in the way life will. Here, for example, is the photograph of my stepson (five or six at the time) laughing and---egged on by the irrepressible father---sitting in a British taxicab that some local ‘pub’ had parked outside as an inducement to tourists, naughtily giving the camera the English two-fingered finger. Five minutes later he was throwing one of the worst tantrums ever because his dad decided we wouldn't have time to play miniature golf after all. And the picture makes me really sad because where is that little boy now? I mean this literally; his mom, who walked out on his dad when he was two, never liked me, never stopped resenting me, and never allowed me to see him or speak to him again after Don died.
In the photographs of my first husband, you can also see a transition. I never thought about it, but in my younger days I must have had a weakness for irrepressible guys, because thought they had little else in common, they had that. The first was literally ‘full of fun,’ looking for fun, expecting it. “He always has that twinkle in his eyes,” my mother said. But in the later photographs, before we broke up, you can see how fed up he was. Again, the look has changed; the twinkle is gone; the twitched-up smile put on for the camera is clearly exactly that.
I’m looking now at a photograph of myself, years ago now, dancing at a tourist bar, with my arms are full of small stuffed animals that Don won from one of those vending machine games where you pay for the chance to ‘win’ one of them by picking it up with a hook or claw and dropping it through a chute. He went through a period when due to some quirk in his chronically wavering luck he could clear out any of those machines anywhere in a single night. He used to do that on a regular basis (much to the disgust of the owners). We gave away an enormous sack of them to a children’s cancer ward, but I kept back a couple of them. They were only cheap little things, not worth as much as the price of your chances, but lots of people try for them and fail. During that period, Don never failed. It seemed like some sort of trivial magic.
Anyway, in this picture I am laughing, but even someone who didn't know me would see the anxiety in my expression. He was on the point of losing another job---he was in a very high turn-over industry----and he was dealing with it by spending his time in bars drinking and winning little stuffed animals from vending machines. He thought it was a sign of something, I think. I wanted to believe it was.
There's an earlier one of Don, me, and the kids at the Sandford zoo. Everyone's smiling, but even in the ones my stepdaughter took you can sense a certain distance and opposition between Don and me. Even in the ones where we are sitting together, we aren't really in synch. That picture was taken after the very first time I really saw him lose his temper and---in his parlance---'throw a wobbler.' It ended with him picking up the cordless phone and hurling it against the wall, where it smashed into a thousand pieces. The only thing I can't remember is why. I am sure I was implicated.
Later, after his father died and things began to go seriously against him---he took it personally; he'd always believed himself to be fortune's favored; and, applying the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, he blamed me for it----the outbursts became more frequent. On that particular day, though, I was shocked into placating him so we could go ahead with our zoo plans. So here I am, smiling qualifiedly into the camera, holding up my stepson so he can feed the emus, sitting perched on a bench with the stepson on my lap and my stepdaughter on the other side of me. It was a nice little zoo down in the south central part of the state; I don't suppose I'll ever get the chancee to go back now. The pictures remind me not only of the fun I had feeding the animals but also of the misery that preceded them. It was all transitory and it all feels the same now.
Photographs hold still. They show you beyond any possibility of dispute how it looked. A videotape is always moving and the faces often go by hastily as the person being filmed waves it away. More often than not, the person being filmed looks irritable, frowns, holds up a hand to cover the camera, and looks away till it’s gone. People are easier to capture in a flash or the blink of a shutter; or they don’t have time to react till it’s gone.
Looking back at my old photographs, the most evocative aren't the ones I took of them, but the ones they took themselves. For example, the first husband, from whom I was divorced: if I ever doubted that there was a time when he loved me, I can look back and see the proof in the sheer number of photographs there are of me, studying, eating, sleeping, playing with my cats, playing on a kid’s swingset, hiking, drinking wine out of the bottle, etc., etc. The pictures have that irrevocable, bygone feel: the young person in them could be a stranger; I’m nothing like the person she was and I don’t like her or want to remember what it was like to be her or to feel her feelings. But the person on the other side of the camera was someone whose unfailing affection and generosity and trust I had to grow up to understand, and whose value I didn’t recognize until well after the fact. It’s odd how much of that comes through when I look back at him looking at me.
As for Don, the strongest and most evocative and least ambivalent memories I have are the ones that surface when I look at the many landscape photographs he took when we were pursuing that hobby. It seems extraordinary to realize it, but when I look at one of my all-time favorites, a photograph of a canal in the charming town of Cedar Key, I’m literally seeing what he saw during a period of our life that is not only gone but that can never be recovered or resurrected. And the same holds true for the photograph he took the first time we went to a certain quiet family beach where his sadness and anxiety was temporarily alleviated by the intense colors and especially the amazing yellow tint of the rocks they'd dug up from the sea against the very blue water.
Looking through those photographs isn’t like looking through a window into my own past but like looking through his eyes into his. Extraordinary.
RELATED POSTINGS
Friendly and Unfriendly Ghosts.
The False Nostalgia Syndrome.
How Donne Missed the Point.
The Ghost in the Image: Photography and Memory.
Thanatology 101---The Need for an Etiquette of Dying.
Image drawn by Mr. Tenniel; painted by Damozel!
6:19:52 PM 
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