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Through the Lonely Eyes of Photographs

I ordered something different the other week at Bon’s, yet everything still felt the same; kind of like a photograph I had seen before.

We were seated ridiculously close to a pair of girls – in the Bon’s pack-‘em-in fashion. So close that we felt obliged to exchange hello’s in the event that our elbows may touch in the near future as we fork and knifed our individual paths through bacon and eggs.

We were nearly done eating when my conversation touched on the fact that Christmas was only six days away. Upon realizing this, my friend was astonished and felt the need to tell the world, in case they too had missed this important news. He turned to the girls beside us and declared brilliantly, “There’s only six days ‘til Christmas!”

This information sparked a surprisingly lengthy conversation between the two tables – two pairs of strangers. “Have you been to Kits lately?” one girl challenged, “It’s mayhem! All those stores for babies and dogs and everyone doing their Christmas shopping! It’s sick!” My friend fired back, “Ya, I know, the other day I saw a woman with her baby in her purse and her dog in a stroller!” Eventually the conversation led to trends of Vancouver at this time of year, ways of eating eggs, and more randomness that I can no longer recall.

Then one of the girls turned to me at a heightened philosophic moment of the morning and said, “Doesn’t this remind you of a Woody Allen movie?”

This got to me. Not that I like Woody, I actually haven't watched most of his films, but the way that we tend to understand our own lives better through movies than through our own experiences. The four of us stopped for a second, silently realizing that we could be any four random people, in any cheap diner, in any city. We were no one to each other, and more sadly, no one in relation to anywhere. As soon as she called the moment on itself, it felt so rehearsed. So, not our own anymore. It was no longer idiosyncratic or unique – it had been played out in any number of movies.

I kept feeling as though a video camera should be parked at the right angle, or my eye would catch sight of the boom and distract me, so we’d have to restart this scene that had been restarted in an endless circle of repetitions worldwide already.

It was eerie.

This topic led to more of a discussion of how the digital age takes something away from our personal lives; something that I’ve been basically dwelling on since last spring. I had just gotten my first digital camera at the time, and soon after decided that my life was better represented by photographs. I had been spending a lot of time alone, not by choice necessarily – I was recently single and freshly heartbroken with no appetite for life – so I spent most of my summer alone, doing all the things one should do in the summer. I went to the beach everyday, the Island, road trips to the Okanagan; I just did it alone.

I took a lot of photographs, of myself, of moments with friends, of wonderful sunsets and urban scapes. So when my sister came to visit and I showed her what I’d been up to lately, all she could say was “What a wonderful life you have, it’s so fun!” This made me feel more empty than ever, knowing all too well just how much effort went into putting on each of those smiles for each click of the camera.

I decided my life in postcards would be better than the real thing. I even mentioned this to people; they couldn’t understand it at all, “But you’re having the best summer ever!”

So many times, even before this weird summer, I’ve gone to parties, to shows, on trips, and been so intent on taking pictures to show how much fun it was to the people that could not be there, that I’ve basically missed out on it myself. I can only look back at these photographs and piece together moments. Sometimes I think the memories that I have from my childhood are actually not memories at all, they are simply a memory of a picture from my mother’s photo album.

Photos have a way of skimming off the top layer of the moment and storing it forever. You forget what was going on behind the scenes and only see the faces smiling at the camera, creating a new memory and discarding the truth. Digital cameras make it even worse. People get snap-happy and take pictures of everything, deleting the “bad” ones with the click of a button, so now all the memories are nicely cut, manicured, and stored exactly as we’d like to remember our (im)perfect lives. You can see your life the way you want to be seen, and then show it to everyone else after it’s been perfected.

I find that without the bad moments, the good moments are weakened. They are diluted to a pale solution, losing the density that was once created by contrast to life’s negativity. Similar to when you work a lot, you cannot wait to have a day off to accomplish all those wonderful things that you don’t have time to do, from lying around with someone all day to the tediousness of the laundromat with a good read and a coffee. But what use, or pleasure, can you find in having downtime, without the knowledge that it will end soon. It is hard to appreciate free time if we know it is endlessly available, just as an abundance of perfection loses itself if there is nothing to compare it to. Without a job, and with only perfect pictures, our lives are put on antidepressants. We are leveled.

Mix it up, spice it up, revel in the business of your day, and savor your moments alone. The good is nothing without the bad, and your pictures, well, they can all be deleted. It is what your heart remembers that is worth putting in the album. We are given memories and imaginations for a purpose, if not simply for the obvious reasons.


Josli Rockafella, January 16 2006