Photographs and Memories

By G. E. Shuman



It’s an old Jim Croce song; ‘Photographs and Memories‘… the lyrics continue with: “Christmas cards you sent to me, all that I have are these to remember you.” I absent-mindedly ran this song through my head recently, as our family and extended family slowly strolled through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. As we reverently took in the specter of countless museum masterpieces and antiquities, our daughter Emily captured much of it on, well, not on film. Actually, I’m not sure what it is that cameras capture images ‘on’ anymore, if they capture them on anything of substance at all, as they store them in some tiny electronic chip’s memory. I guess Mr. Croce’s tune from the seventies captures that image completely; one of photographs themselves being caught in memories. How prophetic the old storyteller was.

At only fifteen, Emily has, truly, become the family photographer. Progressing upward through ever-more intricate and expensive cameras, she is slowly ‘earning to buy more’ and buying to learn more about her hobby, photography. I am amazed at her ever-expanding knowledge of the digital world, and of our world in general, which I sometimes feel this very driven young lady may just, someday, rule.

Lately, through things such as museums full of antiquities and various anniversaries being brought before me, I have come to realize that life is, somehow, both long and short. It is long in days of labor and pain, but very short in the accumulation and remembrance of passing years. Albert Einstein once related that time really is a relative thing. He said that an hour, when passed in the presence of a beautiful woman, may seem but a moment, but that a moment, when passed in the dentist’s chair, may seem a very long hour, indeed. The ten short years since 9-11-2001 have seemed to fly buy, to me, just as have those same ten years, when defining the span of time from today, as it is viewed, backwards, to the day my father was placed in his grave. He missed 9-11 by only a few weeks, having fallen asleep on August 20^th. 2001. The thirty nine years of married life which Lorna and I celebrated just three days before that August 20^th date seem, in some ways, to have flown by, although I could almost be convinced that the early years of it belong in someone else’s memories and lifetime. How strange that is, to me.

As I watched Emily, methodically, carefully, capturing images on, or in, the memory card inside her camera on the day of our visit to the museum, I pondered at what she was really doing. As ‘Photographs and Memories’ swam through my mind, the ancient Egyptian mummies and several-millennia-old sandstone statues of men and women somehow seemed but efforts to photograph the past. They were, and are, the time-bandits of their day, just as are the more recent, but still ancient Victorian- era paintings, sculptures, decorations and furnishings that Emily captured. All of those things have accomplished what little else could, in their time. They cheated death. They did this, not by keeping their subjects and craftsmen young and alive, but by preserving their images and ideas, in stone relief, chiseled writings, and hand-polished things, stretching way out from them, into unseen future times, until they, finally, fatefully, have arrived in ours. I then looked, to see Emily in the process of photographing the smiling face of one of our beautiful, ‘momentarily’ motionless grandchildren, and I realized that what she was doing was exactly the same thing.