The only thing that hurts more than a bad picture
is a lost picture.
Most times, to cement the details of an event in my mind, I take pictures. A picture is a frozen moment from a string of moments. Behind every photo, there is a story; behind every story, there is a past. The emotions that the images evoke give photos meaning.
“James, all our efforts today were wasted. We lost all the pictures,” Tunde said. I had just finished dinner and wanted to settle for a movie marathon when he called. “A virus attack or something. It affected the camera’s memory card also, so we can’t get the raw pictures.”
Hours spent selecting, sorting, and editing wasted. An entire day’s shoot, gone with the wind. The story behind each photo forgotten before it is told.
I delved into photography by accident. I have always loved pictures and have an archive of exotic photos. One day I took a photo with a friend’s phone and he loved it. It dawned on me then that I could create photographs not just collect them; that I could freeze time for the future because memory dims and forgetting happens. A blunt pencil is better than the sharpest memory, a blurred camera lens than the clearest mind.
Procession – Batangas Day Celebration 2015 , Batangas City, Philippines.
Women who lose their babies carry the pain forever. My mom has five of us, but she still talks about the one that didn’t make it. That loss hurts her even though it’s been more than thirty years. Losing photos is the closest I have come to how my mom feels. I hold on to the carcasses of damaged hard drives because letting them go means accepting that the memories stored in them are forever lost. Sometimes, I survey the hard drives and wonder, why. Why didn’t I back everything up? Why didn’t I upgrade my cloud storage when I could? But the hard drives do not answer, they stare back and dare me to cherish memories I no longer remember.
One of my greatest fears is losing my memory—of waking up and discovering I can’t remember anything—and that even my writings and photographs, which I employed to freeze moments, can’t help jump-start my memory, because they are lost. I fear losing an extension of myself via lost memories and photos.
In my desire to freeze moments for Throwback Thursday, I often let things go unnoticed and become unmindful of the emotions the camera cannot capture. Behind every photo, there is a story. But of what use is a story if it does not evoke the emotions that bind us to it? The remedy I’ve found is in the poem, If, by Rudyard Kipling: [to] fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. To enjoy the moment, rather than merely freezing it.
PHOTO CREDITS
Cover photo by Olanami Theophilus, he is on Instagram @Spookyslim1
Embeded Photo by #TheIncurableOptimist, you can find him on Instagram @bekexjj
COPYRIGHTS
This post was originally published at Livelytwist.com as part of a overwhelming series on Loss.
You could start a journal for yourself incase you have senile dementia or alzheimers or even any form of amnesia or for those left behind or yet to come
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Thanks for reading Oma.
I haven’t seen The Notebook yet, but I’ve heard great reviews of it. Will check it out though.
As for memories, I guess we all share the fear of losing them. Its our memories that makes us who we are and when we lose pieces of them, its equivalent to losing pieces of ourselves.
As for the Alzheimer bit, it just dawned on me that most of our Grannies who seem to be out of touch with reality might just be having Alzheimer. Its something we really need lots of enlightenment on. Especially in Nigeria,
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Some also have senile dementia. It’s terrifying really
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I love and agree with every word of the last paragraph.
Hmm…One of my most favourite movies is The Notebook and it got me thinking about what it would be like to lose memories.
Memories are so important to me and so, like you, one of my greatest fears is losing mine. Before my grandmother passed away, she had Alzheimer’s. We had to introduce ourselves to her each time we saw her. This was someone who named us, carried us and was very present in our lives. It was so sad.
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