MindSpinner

For me, a photograph will always be very like a poem, for both are meant to capture something true. If I see a body of photographs taken by a single photographer, I catch a glimpse of what it is to look at the world through another pair of eyes. And sometimes, when I take my own photographs with my extraordinary 8 megapixel gift camera, I realize that the camera sees more than I do and that to look at a photograph can be seeing as if for the first time.

But photographs are mute witnesses: they capture only a sliver of what is real: an instant’s configuration of light and shadow and color. In fact, they often evoke within us much more than they capture of the actualities of the moment in which the shutter clicked. Susan Sontag asserts that “the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” Photographs do tell us something, but often we know not what. And it is what photographs do not tell us that invites us to conjecture (and even to mislead ourselves), for we must have our stories, even if we have to make them up. We are usually very happy to make them up. In fact, we can hardly resist doing so. We create worlds outside and behind the borders of the frame. Whether we thereby do good or harm depends upon the nature of the stories that we tell - and upon whether we mistake them for actuality when it is actuality that we are after.

There are two photographs in my wedding album (now stacked in two pieces in the guest room closet), one of me kissing my father, the other of me being kissed by my mother, in set shots posed by the photographer, which serve to illustrate. In the first, as I kiss my father’s cheek, his face is warm and happy. As my mother kisses mine, my expression is vaguely anxious. My father made much of these two photographs in subsequent arguments with my mother. He could tell, he told my mother, how his daughter really felt about her mother from that wedding picture. The picture told the story of a detached, distant relationship: the bride’s face apparently frozen, almost visibly cringing at her mother’s touch.

But the picture actually tells the story of headpieces and hairpins. I made my own dress and veil, you see. I was happy enough with the dress: its sweep of satin, its arrangements of lace, its 25 pearl buttons sewn one by one down the back. And my dress was happy enough with me - as long as I stood in precisely the posture assumed by the dress form upon which I fitted it: shoulders back, chest thrust out. Only if I slipped into my accustomed, absolutely instinctual, round-shouldered slouch did the bodice just sort of cave in. “Shoulders back, shoulders back” was the mental theme of my wedding day. The veil was more problematic. Its foundation was a stiff headpiece that had to be pinned to my fine hair, hair that, when I was a little girl, would never hold a barrette or a pretty comb. Homemade veils do not come with instructions. Or glue. Or clamps. My bridesmaids and I had it pinned here and pinned there, and still the arrangement felt most precarious. I could just see it hanging over my left ear by the time I said, “I do.”

In the picture snapped as my mother kissed me, she rested her hand on my back, and that veil – I could feel it – was being pulled back, back, back. “Careful, Mama, I thought, it’s coming off.”

So much for the story photographs tell, snapped as they are out of time, concealing as they do, the precarious hairpins that hold reality together. The story that photographs really tell is that we are storytellers all.