On photographs and time

How many years will it be until no one remembers who you are?



I just watched this brief documentary on school portraits, those images dreaded by all students and loved by (almost) all parents. They show nothing but a shell of the vibrant person inside, give no indication of our actual selves, and serve only to document the passing of time. And that last reason is why so many people cannot resist them.

At the end of the documentary, the narrator observes that time is relentless and no amount of photographs will keep us from disappearing from memory. I'd like to hope that it's not true, but time will go on forever, I suppose. Still, I hope dearly that my girls and their children will see our endless flood of photos and someday piece together who I was and am to them. Maybe in that respect, the legacy will continue and there will always be a bit of me (and them) trickling down through time.

A few years ago, Vivian Maier became posthumously famous after a historian came across hundreds of thousands of undeveloped images she had taken in her lifetime. Amongst them are millions of people frozen in time, and I wonder how many are already forgotten. We can imagine so much about them from Vivian's very candid images. I can only imagine how much more would be lost to time if she had sat each person down and asked them to smile. There is so much to be gained in documenting more than just the shell.