Hi world.

Happy Sunday. ❤

I recently started reading Sally Mann’s gorgeous memoir, Hold Still, and can’t stop thinking about something that she said. Something about the haunting distortion of reality that even the best art invariably partakes in. Plus, why my early recognition of this drove my family absolutely mad.

SALLY MANN’S PREOCCUPATION WITH MEMORY

Hold Still is a memoir with photographs, or, the best kind. Some of my favorite books include the author’s photography within them, such as Patti Smith’s M-Train, Insomniac City by Bill Hayes, and The Lonely City by Olivia Laing.

I’m not a photographer in the legitimate sense, but I am obsessed with casual photo taking as a mode of storytelling. I’m constantly taking shots throughout the day and editing them by night. One of my favorite things about this blog is that it is a running collection of those photos, tied in with my writing. There’s something comforting about the level of documentation that these two mediums combine to provide, as if surely, through both photos and prose, nothing will be able to slip away.

You could say that this obsession with documenting my life stems from what Mann refers to as a long preoccupation with the treachery of memory. Or the compulsive need to consistently try to wrap your hands around something that is only water falling through your hands. We can’t contain the water, but we try all of the time. Largely, through photographs.

We take pictures of the things that we are afraid to lose. I am constantly shooting the ground beneath my feet, the coffee shops that I am at, the campus stairs that I climb everyday. I snap shots of this city, this world, this moment, as frantic attempts to freeze time before everything changes. I think most of us see photos in that way, as ways to freeze moments of our lives before they fall away from reach, if they were ever within it.

THE BROKEN PROMISE OF A PHOTO

Yet Mann writes something that radically challenges this.

“Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering,” I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.”

-Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

This blew my mind. I’ve always known that writing is an ethereal realm of distortion, that all you have are little black letters to weave into coherence, to some larger, pin-pointed truth. That’s the deal we sign on to. You try to document what a photo does with one click. A photo is supposed to be worth a thousand words and all that. It’s supposed to be our one, unavoidably honest medium.

Yet the more that I thought about this fallacy of photographic truth, the more I began to realize that I agree with Mann.

WHY I DRIVE MY FAMILY CRAZY

Growing up, I loathed perhaps nothing more than the family photo. At every gathering of cousins and distant relatives, every birthday, holiday, or whatever forcefully joyous occasion they dragged me to with ribbons in my hair, there was always the dreaded moment where some satanic figure would interrupt the natural flow of socialization to say, Okay everybody! Photo time! Let’s all go to the backyard and huddle together! If the satanic figure was feeling especially sadistic, they would instruct us all to make silly faces, a ritual I vehemently protested on the grounds of what would become the thesis of my artistic life: authenticity.

The problem was never the act of photography. I love photos. The problem was that it was so fake. Year after year, there are these hideous snapshots of the exact same moment, forcefully recreated. We’re standing in the same spot, wearing the same fake smiles, our eyes latent with the desire for it to all be over so we can get back to whatever we were actually doing. And what were we doing? I don’t know. It was never captured.

AUTHENTIC DOCUMENTATION

What I’m trying to say is that it would have been so much more meaningful if there was someone just taking casual, candid shots of the scene. Don’t tell people to smile, capture them exactly as they are. Don’t tell them to look at the camera, photograph how they are looking at each other. Photograph mom taking the pie out of the oven and grandpa sleeping in the chair and my big brother yanking my pigtails. The imperfect moments that can’t be staged or recreated.

Which, to bring it back to what Mann is saying, has to do with the ways in which those perfectly curated snapshots don’t actually freeze the moment as it was, but rather create a moment of their own. She writes that photographs supplant and corrupt the past…creating their own memories. If I were to forget about everything, and you presented one of those family photographs to me, I might believe it. I might think, Oh, look at how happy and lovely they all look, not remembering that someone just dropped the pie on the floor and one aunt in crying in her car while the other two gossip about her in the kitchen and that cousin is about to have a mental breakdown. (That cousin is me.) These things, the real things, would be replaced by a lie. And if the lie is all that you have, you might as well believe it. Distorted and all.

DIRTY DISHES MAKE GREAT MUSES

So fast forward to now, while my family hates nothing more than my undying protest against the posed photo, I stand by it. I try to capture things as authentically as I can. If all photos are guilty of distorting reality in some sense, I like to give them the best fighting chance at truth that I can. Sometimes I take photos of dirty dishes after dinner parties or my face after I have been crying. I photograph what I’m reading, and where. I secretly take shots of the people in my life when they aren’t looking, documenting the behind the scenes of my life as it is today in that ever-present preoccupation with not forgetting.

What do you not want to forget?

Love, m.

GET ON THE LIST

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.