art of photo taking

There is this photo of mine:  blond girl-child maybe three or four years old in a field with a chocolate brown colt, her fingers stretched out to its muzzle, sun haloing her crazy curls. It's an old photo, 25-years-old, taken in a time when photographs were less common than sneezes.

I'm older now. My curls are brown, and the colt is a gelding turning grey-at-the-edges. To me, that photo represents something---a precious feeling of wonder. I recently asked my mother, "Remember when..." and we talked about the setting of my earliest memories. It was as if we had opened a book, the more pages we turned, the more details we thought about, the more emotions we remembered. A portrait of our life started to reform--my mother loved her horses. She loved me, too. She was young, younger than I am today, and she was adjusting to life and love and family and the animals that were a part of it. And I don't believe there is a copy of that photo left in existence.

I felt a little sad when my mother mentioned that the photo was gone. Ironically sad. Because photos,  to me, are over-taken and over-shared and over-needed to make a situation legitimately real.

Have we lost our ability to record memories in our brains, and access them later?

Granted, I've had more practice than most. When young, our family lost our photographs and papers and memorabilia. I was forced to transfer my feelings and emotions away from things I could one day lose, and put them in my built-in data-base--my own memory.

I may over-do my enthusiasm for NOT taking pictures, at times. As a missionary, I once spent 18 months amongst a Hispanic community that I served and loved, in a culture that I readopted as my own, only to take just one roll and a half of dispensable photos. (Even then, I left the half roll behind.) Another time,  I was on the Great Wall of China and noticed my camera lens was cracked. I put it away and didn't bring it out again the entire trip. I bet there are a few memories somewhere in my head that could be sparked with a visual that could have been recorded on film.

I am known to be perplexed by our propensity as digital-age divas to document anything and everything we experience. From blogs (yes) to FB to TWTR to Snapshot to Text-Talk to Post-a-Lot to whatever we will think of next:

Cute pink nails--Par-TAY! Cool fashion, girl!

Grocery shopping--95c/lb broccoli!!!

OMG!  Talk talk talk talk twitter twitter tweet.

And whether we have this insatiable obsession to feel famous amongst an internet crowd of famousness, or to decode vibrations of speculation on our outer strands of a world wide cobweb, we self-document and self-publish and self-contribute, both the big and small of our lives--I wonder, is it working? Do we feel more connected with our friends on OverShare.Com; does following Kutcher's tweets mean we actually know him?

I am annoying to my peers, the ones that I see face-to-face, and maybe the ones that I used to see, too. They hear me repeatedly pleading for them to put down the camera, or the phone, or the camera phone, and be present in the conversation. Or to not take a picture, for goodness sake. Or please don't post that on the internet, I'm hiding from the Law (jk. clean-as-a-whistle).

You see, I know there is more I can remember, and record for someone who will care--later. Maybe a granddaughter, or some historian documenting obscure American lives--but I only have so much of me to give. I can't waste it on the 2500 pics taken while in Tahiti (not me). Give me one or two photos to represent something I want to remember, and let my brain do the rest.

Maybe there is an argument that boils down to the saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." Didn't I just tell you that our family lost everything and now has no items of nostalgia left? Yeah, maybe that's true.

But my mother and I just had an entire conversation based on a photo that neither one of us has seen in years. Maybe there's something to be said about that, too.