Today I am taking pictures of a friend’s family. It is one of the hardest things to do for me, to take pictures of a child, someone, anyone who is life itself for someone else and translate that love in an image. Sometimes those images are going to be all we have left of a loved one.
It is a false pretense, that defiance of death through photography. What hubris! My brother looking at the camera with a thin air of defiance on his lips, and the cigarette between his fingers. He’s been dead more than twenty years and the image is all I have and nothing like what he was. An image will never be more than a shadow, pure creation.
After taking family pictures, or pictures of children, I always feel that I failed, failed dismally, in that creative endeavor. The problem is there is always something else I could have done, something I could have done differently; as in any art form the variations are maddeningly infinite by nature.
Infinite too, the mistakes you feel you make when raising a child by yourself, infinite the headaches and the worrying. My youngest a tangle of nerves and pent-up emotions these days, draining me in the wake of his exuberant rebellions, sweet as can be and determined but fragile, like thin crystal, and that thin membrane I see like a reflection of myself in him and I want to spare him the mistakes, emotions rolling in and out like destructive waves, it’s ok, my love my life, and later it will all be forgotten like finger drawings in the sand.
Images like finger drawings in the sand.
That picture of you an illusion we have become so eager to think as reality.
Yes, your brother is dead.
ReplyDeleteTo you who knew him, your photo -- because he's dead -- is a travesty.
But to me -- who didn't know him -- your photograph is what gives him life. Look at him! I think. Such insouisance! He could be a young Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Which is a long-winded way of saying photography is a relative magic, Valerie.
And it happens you are an extraordinarily good magician.
I'm really sorry your superb circus pictures did not get the attention they deserved. It really is all about the marketing on that one. I look at Vivian Maier -- I'm not convinced she was a great photographer, by the way; I'm convinced she was a prolific photographer, and some fraction of her photos turned out to be great. They were the ones we saw. But the guy who stumbled across her photos in that storage facility was a genius marketer.
Being a single mother is very, very tough. Particularly without a strong support system in place. But you've done really, really well in establishing a stable, beautiful (judging from the photos of your house) setting for them. It will get much, much better moving forward.