Ma, isn’t there a temple near here? I said to my mom (in Cantonese) as we were walking around District 5 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam last year. I was thinking of the temple we had visited the last time we were in Vietnam… the temple where my grandfather’s ashes had been laid to rest.
She answered my question with an Ay?, a little surprised by where we found ourselves and then she started walking towards a side street. I followed her wondering where we were going. We went down an alley with a dead end. I was confused, but before I had a chance to ask my mom, she exclaimed three Chinese words with short pauses between each word as if she was counting 1-2-3. Even more confused, I realized she was saying the words to a woman sitting in front of a door in the alley. The woman, after a short pause, widened her eyes and replied in the same pronounced manner with three different Chinese words I recognized this time… my mother’s Chinese name.
This was my mother’s childhood friend. Whom she hadn’t seen or talked to in over 50 years! Yet the way they greeted each other was as if it had been much shorter than that. And my mom remembered exactly where her friend had lived over 50 years ago, next to the temple.
While sitting in small red plastic chairs, I sat with them outside the home as they recounted their lives and caught up with each other and everything that has happened since the War and since my mom left the country.
And then, the friend went back inside her home and came out with photographs… photographs over 50 years old.
The photographs were of their friends including my mom… some were posed athletic team photos, some were candid, and some were wedding photos. They talked and laughed over the photographs… about the good ol’ times, their lives as friends, their other friends in the photos, and what became of their friends and their families especially after the War, the weddings and deaths, piecing together the missing timelines of each others’ lives which they couldn’t be a part of. I was moved that such photographs were bringing back memories as vividly as if it were just a week ago. Seeing what was unfolding before me, I even started taking photographs of them while they reminisced and fast forwarded through their half a century worth of life experiences in the middle of the alley in the red plastic chairs… new memories being created from old memories, a new cycle.
Many months later, Bambi Cantrell said the following during her CreativeLIVE online photography workshop on Posing & Lighting:
When your parents are deceased, your grandparents are deceased, your sister is deceased, and many of the people that you have loved and known throughout your life are no longer around, that’s when pictures become treasures to you because that’s what we have left of those people and so I think that it’s really important for us to document those wonderful people that come in and out of our lives and that I think family pictures especially are extremely important, not to us as much as they are to our children and the generations that come after us.
And the cool thing that we have the ability to do today that they didn’t have 100 years ago… when we look at pictures of our grandparents from 100 years ago, we can tell by looking at them very few things… we can tell what they wore, we can tell maybe whether they were rich or poor, but we could tell nothing about their personalities. You see, today, we have the wonderful privilege of not only documenting what a person wore on their wedding day, and the fact that they had a wedding cake, and that they danced at the reception. We have the opportunity and the privilege of being able to document who they were and all of the wonderful nuances that made them those quirky people that they were… because we are where we are in the scheme of time, we have that wonderful privilege of going farther and documenting the human spirit, not just the shell of that person.
I wanted to shout Amen at the computer screen as she said this! There is a reason why one of the first items people take are photographs when they have to evacuate their home. There is a reason why my mom, when she left her country, had hardly anything in her possession once she got to the United States, but did have a stack of photographs of her friends, her family, and her wedding.
And it was the old photographs of a parent who had unexpectedly passed away without having a chance to say goodbye that gave me great comfort and happy memories to reminisce when needing to select photographs for the funeral… and there was unexpected relief to have that one recent family portrait that didn’t seem as important to take at the time because there was supposed to always be time to take them later.
Recently, I saw Chase Jarvis’ post on The Power of an Image:
A photograph – an image – is an incredibly powerful thing. It can be a tool, intentionally or incidentally. It can tell an entire story of a month, year, decade, or a generation, captured in perhaps just 1/1000 of a second. An image [can] change a life, end a war, start a riot, bring someone joy, inspire a revolution, open or close a debate. An image can move the world.
As I experimented a bit with video last year or so, especially with the new DSLRs that can capture amazing HD crisp quality photo, I found that I (as Chase puts it) “still respect and value for the 130 year old concept of a photo” and often even more so than a video. It’s the 1/1000th of a second capture of time that freezes a story and emotion that captivates me, a split second in time that you may not otherwise easily notice in moving images. It’s the power of a fleeting moment that may never return again. To be remembered over a half century later.
This is why I love photographs and why I create them.
