Our [Josh’s] laptop with all our photos on has crashed for the second time, and for the second time we have potentially lost months of lovely photos. (Some are on dropbox, and backed up elsewhere, fear not!)
However, it’s in things like that, and it’s whilst I’m looking through recent photos that I think about how limiting it can be to rely purely upon those moments which are captured visually in photos. There are plenty of wonderful moments which will remain unimmortalised because they are ones when we didn’t have a camera, or didn’t use one. The same with the memories we remember, repeat, write down.
The uncaptured can drift away, and the feelings of contentment on a warm spring evening when baby is in bed and the exam has been done, the potential in the air of wondering what to do next; those are things which I don’t think you can do justice in a picture. Life, for me at least, has the danger of becoming a big wheel of images which scroll through my head; holiday snapshots, instagram moments, reeling through. There is a danger also of thinking that things that aren’t photographed don’t matter as much, and that the people who feature regularly matter more, or are better.
I’m trying to take some more photos of regular life, unstaged, just what our lounge looks like, or a nice shadow and less ‘cheese’ moments. Equally I want to focus on the inbetweens, the uncaptured, the actual living which can’t be encapsulated into a snapshot which shows only a millisecond of what life and existance and feelings were like then. I’m trying to take a few more snippets of video of Phoebe, just so she can see what she actually acted like and sounded like, which is harder in photos, freezing a second.
Looking back at photos from our first year of marriage – whilst it’s a shame there’s not many, and mostly just of Christmas and outings, it’s also fine, because the memories and feelings I have of that time are not diminished by not having them in visual form. The uncaptured is valuable, as is the captured (I still love photos and want to take them!). I want to remember and value both.
Leave a Reply