I strongly admire my grandmother’s ability to want to learn. While our interests in the sciences were of different paths, she had clear passion for nature in all its forms. She used to buy us bacteria cultivation kits, tend to her garden in rural Germany and walk through the woods pointing out different types of fungi. Seeing a willingness to explore and learn was there even as she aged. She showed great perseverance in her transition to the smartphone age, knowing my grandfather had neither will nor curiosity for the matter.
Whenever I visited the village, she had requests about her gadgets, be that her iPad or her backyard camera she used to track mice (not rats!). These requests were not problems per se, rather things she tried to figure out and wanted to know the canonical approach for. I gladly obliged.
During one such session of tech support, we started talking about photos. Having followed a track from film cameras to digital and finally to smartphones, she felt that the importance of a photo had diminished. She loved looking into old albums of her past that she had personally curated and developed, but didn’t feel the same gravitas to the SQLite database that held her mobile memories. While this can be chalked up to a supply v demand matter, I think there is something more core to the experience of the memory machine we all have.
The photos you take, while plentiful, are generally a storyboard of your existence. This is especially the case for the younger generations, where from memes to receipts you can weave who you were- perusing your past through the photos gallery. I always valued this aspect of your photo library as a digital archive of the entire history of you. It is gloriously you, pruning be damned! I tried to convey this to her, but I think her lived experience was the contrary.
The smartphone photo taking experience is one of documentation rather than finding perfect moments. Those moments are still there, but they are buried under the cruft that is necessary to capture a moment. Out of tens of thousands of photos, just a small fraction of those are competent pictures, the rest are the webs that piece together the past.
Following a tragic experience of recent, I delved through the annals of my library. The past year had been full of devotion: a love that had turned to grief of a thing I never expected to pass. I tend to grieve the passing of things before they happen, it allows me to be more cognizant of how lucky I am to be with them. You cannot grieve a sucker punch; you take it. A library filled with a year’s worth of pure, concentrated love (unrequited for the latter stages) was all I saw.
On February 4th, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection. Marking that moment, I saw a picture I had never remembered taking. I don’t have a habit of taking pictures of myself. I do try to take pictures of things that peaked my interest, even if for a moment. This picture was of a shop in a very popular and expensive district in the city. A shop that would seem out-of-place, but gave the entire district character. Akin to a stamp shop in Midtown Manhattan, this shop gave the people in the area honest access to hand-crafted goods.
The shop was empty when I took the picture. A small square box with tomorrow’s tasks laid down; a to-do list of a bygone era. A memento of something that gave me joy for a split-second. A split-second that preceded the most important moment of my life up until that point.
Reflecting from the shops window was my visage: messy hair, green grey-ish raincoat I had commandeered from my grandfather, a blue hoodie that I had designed in high school and an unsuspecting me. I had arrived earlier than the arranged time. Taking a moment to gather myself and suppress the more awkward parts of my psyche had become almost second nature. Any social interaction required at least an array of simulations in my mind that never actually materialized.
I remember walking up and down the ascending steps of the street in anxiety for my late date and window shopping a host of stores selling the same genre of gauche furniture that I could swear to have seen in the abodes of wealthy friends. The shop I immortalized in my library, in contrast, exuded character than all other stores could only imagine in their slumber.
I waited in front of that shop for a few minutes, crafting stories. Who was running the establishment? Who were their regulars? How had the gentrification of their surrounding affected them?
These stories were interrupted by a ghost. The ghost was in the background; in more ways than one. The moment I captured in my phone had included not only the shop and me, but this ghost as well. A ghost that had been on my mind for the past week as our correspondence had blossomed. But the physical manifestation of our relations was yet to occur.
In the reflection of the shops window. There they were.
Had you stopped time and asked me in the moment, I wouldn’t be able to put it together. To my right in the reflection and real-life, across the street they stood leaning against the wall of the opposing building. The city made us seem as we were- strangers. Background characters in the plays that were our respective lives.
Following that I would take more pictures of them than days we were together. More declarations of love than ones reciprocated. More time thinking of them than being thought about. But the most radical picture was the one where we were on the precipice of something.
I found this image in the midst of my journey from recovering from being discarded by them. Slowly at first and then very suddenly. Not a year has gone by, yet the image has more potency than all the ones taken from a place of love and affection. There may be pictures in the future in both our camera rolls that have the other as a background character. I do not matter to them.
We are strangers once more.