Photographs

After two years in our house, Jon and I finally got some pictures of our family up on the wall. It was a day to celebrate! I’m really good with the big things of decorating: painting, moving furniture, picking out curtains and furniture, etc. I’m good at the overall image of just how I want a room to look. But I’m not so good with figuring out the little things that will make that room more…us. Pictures, I decided, are the perfect thing. Easy, cheap and they make a big statement. And I don’t just like the way it turned out. Uh-uh. I Love, with a capital L, the whole thing. The pictures themselves make me smile every time I glance at them and it doesn’t hurt that the kids are just so dang cute.
I’ve always such a love of pictures. Paintings, photos, black and white or color, it just doesn’t matter to me. You get a little glimpse in time of actual events. No matter what the picture is of, there sits, like bookends, on either side of that picture, a story that was unfolding. And that fascinates me. What led up to that moment and what happened right after? I look closely at all the people in photos and wonder if they were really, truly happy in that moment or if they were obediently saying “cheese” through clenched teeth that merely resembles their true smile. A photograph is a fraction of what happened that day, and I always love to find out more. Even professional photographers seem to realize that a picture might be worth a thousand words, but there are a million more to be said about that single moment. Look at a coffee table book of a photographer’s work and they will add more than just the F-stop and technical information about a photo. They’ll tell the whole story of where it was, what it took to get that instant of perfection and how it made them feel.
More than the perfect photograph, even the most beautiful one, I love the imperfect pictures the very most. I love the ones that show a baby asleep on a mom’s shoulder, a toddler slightly out of focus as they start their dash out of the frame and the true laughter that shines on faces after a good joke. I’m not a huge fan of the “one…two …three, Say Cheese!” moments. I want to glance at a picture and then have to look again because I just have to try to figure out what story that picture is telling. The group shots are valuable for records; who was where when and with whom. But the photos I truly treasure are those that jog a memory, startle a laugh out of me and those that make me happy to look at. The pictures that show a person’s personality are the ones that I choose to enlarge to epic proportions (really, how big are some people’s walls?) and just love to look at. They are the photographs that tell the story of our family, our adventures and achievements. By no means is the picture of Lucy, her cheeks rosy and her hair snarled, a museum-worthy photo. But it was a hot day in August when she took her first ride on her big-kid bike by herself, and her smile is radiant and her eyes are sparkling with pride and excitement. It isn’t every day that a kid learns what it feels like to fly.
The pictures Jon and I hung in our family room show about an hour of one of our days last June while we were in Utah. It was a great, fun day that we were happy to capture some of. But the stories, the bookends of these moments, are the real treasure. Those are the story books I love to “read” to my kids the very most; the photo albums. We can make stories up, if the picture is the beginning or the end of the story, or if, just outside the shot, someone is standing there with them. The stories that go with the pictures are the things that I treasure and am always happy to share. Who knows? Next time I’m looking at someone else’s pictures, humor me, when I ask you to tell me about this particular photo. There’s a story swimming around in my mind that I would just love to know how close I came to the real thing.