1.
One recent day in New Orleans, as the sun began to hide behind clouds and the wind picked up in a way that reminded you, in spite of the warm temperature, that this was November and not the middle of summer, I walked with my family the two blocks to the Latter Library, an old converted mansion on St. Charles Avenue, whose broad lawn cascades down to the cracked and undulating sidewalks at its perimeter.
The children, Evangeline, five years old, and Alex, eighteen months, ambled onto on the lawn. A street car rumbled by and Alex turned to wave. Evangeline finished giving me the complicated instructions to her new game and ran to the top of the sloping lawn.
When she was little, I would throw her into the air, swing her around, and roughhouse with her. She is no longer little, yet her appetite for athletic playing has only increased. Without having heard a word of what she said, I knew that I had been cast as the strongman in the day’s circus. I braced myself.
My daughter was now airborne. A flying monkey coming right at me, headfirst: straw-yellow hair, a blue skirt, blue spaghetti-strap shirt, apple cheeks, and lips garishly smudged with pink lip gloss within which is the whiteness of her bared teeth—
Stop! Right here, let’s freeze the frame. Here is an image that I will never see again, except in my memory. A girl in mid-flight, waves of green behind her, her face all bright with the colors —blue, pink, yellow, white—of joy and delight, and behind her, as though it was the place from which she had fled, an old, dignified mansion.
Right then, as she was airborne, my hand twitched and slapped my pocket, in the dim hope that I could locate my camera, pull it out, and shoot while the moment still held. But there was no camera, and anyway there was no time. I will never forget this image, though I may already be embellishing it. And you will never see it. You may picture it, but the picture itself was not taken. I had to fight off a sadness about this, because the moment, after all, was happening, and it was beautiful, and anything that detracted from my perception of that was a shame.
2.
While on the phone with Apple tech support recently, I was told, “You are not a normal iPhoto user.”
“I’m not?” I said.
“No, you have many more photographs than the average user.”
This comment was conspicuous, breaking the Zen-like calm with which the Apple customer-service representative goes about ascertaining a problem and then working to help fix it. Do I take more pictures than other people? How could that be? More than other people with children?
I have always taken photos, but the volume increased when I got my first digital camera, in 2004. It increased exponentially a few years later, when my daughter was born, and exponentially again when I got my first iPhone. When something notable or beautiful or just atmospheric unfolds in my family, I often reach for the phone and start tapping the camera icon, accumulating images.
I like action shots. I don’t use a flash. A little blur is O.K., as long as the flavor and mood of the light is there. I don’t ask for poses, in fact I actively discourage them. I still remember when my daughter, at the age of three or four, first displayed her fake camera smile. It was awful.
3.
The photojournalist Tim Page wrote a memoir, “Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden: Return to Vietnam and Cambodia,” that made a huge impression on me when I read it in Phnom Penh in 1996, a year after it was published. He writes in a lighthearted, inebriated mode about stumbling with a kind of fated grace through all sorts of perils while working as a journalist in the region. It was the specificity of the scenes and the vividness with which he wrote about covering the Vietnam War that drew me in and kept me reading, but what has stayed with me is my recollection of a casual aside he made in an interview about how he wrote the book.
The memoir has an almost cinematic specificity that was achieved, he said, by starting every writing session with an examination of his contact sheets from the era. He would peer at them through a loupe, and the images would serve as a prompt to his memory.
There was a simple logic to this that held huge appeal. Being a professional photojournalist, Page had taken Christopher Isherwood’s famous opening gambit in “The Berlin Stories”—“I am a camera”—and made it literal. Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.
In 1996, this condition was the luxury of professional photographers. We are now all Tim Page. Or, we have contact sheets. At least, those of us who snap streams of images as though they were jelly beans being scooped into a hand. But a jelly bean in a hand makes sense as long as you eat it. What would you say about a person who collected jelly beans? Whose home was filled with glass jar after glass jar of them? One could ask such a person, What are you planning on doing with all those jelly beans?
4.
It has occurred to me that this picture-taking might in some ways be an excuse to touch and pet and hold the iPhone itself, which has a weirdly calming effect on people, as though it were an amulet or maybe a small living animal. I am guilty of all the smartphone sins—in essence, staring at the phone when you should be staring at life. It’s possible that the act of taking a picture has such appeal because it manages to do several opposing things at once—I am allowed to pet the phone, to let the phone flatter me with its news, to let the phone mediate reality for me, and also to see what is going on around me and bear witness to a moment in my children’s lives, even if I am seeing it on-screen. To mitigate this, I often shoot blind, like firing a gun at the hip while I look directly at the action.
Am I deceiving myself? Because if you are taking a picture of your children, which is to say if you are holding a camera (in the form of a phone) and snapping a picture, then are you, in that moment, looking at them? Or are you anticipating a moment in the future—it is sometimes ten seconds in the future but it could well be ten years—when you will be looking at this very moment?
Sorting through the glut of images, I notice that the ones that seem valuable change with time. What seems like the best shot of the group a day later is often different than what seems most beautiful, or moving, a year or more later. Perusing these images you become a detective looking for patterns that you did not know to look for at the time.
5.
As we walk back from the library, I think of another moment, from a few months earlier, that lives in my memory with no assistance from iPhoto.
We were at the beach. They had opened the cut between the bay and the ocean. A strong tide rushed out to meet the incoming waves. A group of kids and parents stood on a sandbar, balancing in the current rushing past their calves, knees, or, in the case of the smaller kids like my daughter, thighs. She stood a few feet ahead of me, facing the horizon, looking for big waves, screaming and jumping up as they passed, stealing glances at the older kids around her, playing it cool while I stood behind her and regarded the horizon with panic.
Nothing to be afraid of, I told myself. Shallow little waves. Many other kids. It was scary but safe. And yet, at her own insistence, she was on her own—if within arm’s reach —jumping, shouting, even getting tumbled underneath once or twice. Little silvery minnows went by at our feet. There was the feeling of hugeness. The blue-green of the water. Crashing-wave sounds. A few steps to the left, the sandbar gave way and the water was darker. When I stepped there, it was icy cold and up to my waist.
The baby and my wife, Elizabeth, were up on the beach—I would turn now and then to see Elizabeth holding him as he looked down to watch the white froth run over his feet. Evangeline hopping from foot to foot like a boxer waiting for the next wave. The silver minnows in their tight formation, darting around our knees seemed to me like some pious team of nuns, or saints, doing last rites. Of course, I had no phone, I was in the ocean. And later, on the beach, in our towels at last, I discovered that the batteries of our phones had died.
All of this exists in my memory and nowhere else. The clarity of each silvery minnow in the ocean, or the boy’s head outlined against the bright blue sky as he brings a chip to his mouth beneath the umbrella. About them all I must ask: Are they any more vivid to me because there are no photographs? Conversely, would photographing have taken me away and made it all less sharp in my mind?
It’s an era of controlled deprivations and detoxification, of fasts and cleanses. Perhaps everyone should make a weekly ritual of twenty-four hours of undocumented life. Periods of time in which memory must do all the heavy lifting, or none of it, as it chooses, the consequences being what they may be. No phone, no eclipse glasses to mitigate the intensity of what lies before you. The only options are appetite, experience, memory, and later, if so inclined, writing it down.
My wish for visual souvenirs slaps against the clearness of those very images for which I don’t have pictures, in the way that two currents of water slap against each other in the ocean.
I’m told that the slapping of crosscurrents is a sign of a riptide, which is what I had most feared while standing with Evangeline in the ocean—that she would be swept off by a cold current to a place I couldn’t reach. That she would be taken away. She recognized this potential, too, and wanted me near, just not too near. It was important that I be behind her, not in front or even beside her, so her view of the horizon could remain unimpeded. We were practicing for something, some kind of independence from each other.
Thomas Beller’s most recent books are the collection of essays “How To Be a Man” and the novel “The Sleep-Over Artist.” He is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. Read his posts on losing his iPhone in New Orleans, the experience of parking in New York, being locked out of Facebook, and more.
