From the series: The Things We Keep
What we hold on to, and what it holds for us.
There are more than 10 photo albums in a cabinet in my house. I open that cabinet maybe twice a year, usually looking for something else entirely, and I almost never take the albums out.
I could still tell you what’s in them.
Not vaguely. Specifically. The green one has a school trip four or five pages in, and there’s a picture of me with a haircut some adult should have intervened in. Somebody’s arm is around my shoulder. I know which page. I haven’t looked at it in years.
That’s the part I keep turning over. The albums aren’t doing the remembering. I am. They just sit there being the place where it’s kept, and knowing they’re there seems to be enough.
Twenty-four shots for a whole trip
There was a reason those pictures got printed, and it wasn’t sentiment. It was cost. Twenty-four exposures for an entire trip. You framed the shot and then you thought about it, because the next one had to last you until the end of the week. Then you took the roll somewhere and waited, and a stranger developed it, and days later you found out whether you had anything at all.
Half of them came back useless. Thumbs. Closed eyes. A blur where somebody moved.
But the ones that worked, you put in a book. You chose. That was the whole act, and nobody thought of it as an act at the time.
There are around 10,000 photographs on my phone right now. I couldn’t describe one of them to you.
Not one. I know roughly what’s in there, the way you know roughly what’s in a drawer you never open. But if you asked me what I photographed in March I’d have to go and look, and looking would take an hour, and I’d find things I don’t remember taking.
I’m not going to tell you the old way was better. It wasn’t. I have pictures now of ordinary afternoons nobody would have wasted film on, and some of them are the best ones I’ve got.
But something did change, and I think it’s this. When a photograph cost something, you decided what mattered before you pressed the button. Now you decide afterward, and mostly you never get around to deciding at all.
The one I don’t remember
Something happens with the albums that has never once happened with the phone.
Every so often I pull one out for some reason and a photograph turns up that I have no memory of. Not the day. Not the place. Sometimes not even the person standing next to me.
And someone took it deliberately. Someone thought it was worth one of the twenty-four. It got chosen, developed, held in a hand, slid into a sleeve, and every one of those steps was a small decision made by somebody who believed this was worth keeping.
And it’s gone. Completely. Whatever it was about has closed over without leaving a mark.
I find that unsettling in a way I haven’t fully worked out. Not sad exactly. More like finding a room in your own house you don’t remember.
So why keep them, if I never look.
The honest answer is that I don’t know. They aren’t doing anything. They take up a shelf. If the house burned down I’d be devastated about them, and I still wouldn’t open them next year.
Maybe some things are kept so they exist rather than so they’re used. A backup of a life, stored offsite, in a cabinet, in a house, behind a door I open twice a year.
Maybe that’s what keeping is. Not holding something close. Just refusing to let it stop existing.
Two questions I can’t answer about my own:
- Which album would you carry out of a burning house, and when did you last open it?
- Somebody will look through your photographs one day without you there to explain them. Which ones will they not be able to place?
Warm Wishes
