This is Me: Lines on a Young Lady's Missing Photographs

It is so easy. Too easy. I see a fragment of myself as I am going by the mirror, and I shot a photo; I am seated in the pace at the end of the summer, liking the special timbre of the light, and I shot a photo; I love the strong proof of my feet stepping on the sidewalk, and I shot a photo.I am recording, documenting, and classifying my imprints in this world.

The archive of me from just the final 5 days is already towering absurdly over my pre-digital-camera existence. Along with thousands of others who are profiting from the technical and marketing boom of the user-friendly digital camera, I have turned into a mechanical eye insisting on capturing the way life feels from my peculiar perspective so that evening when I myself am not in the picture, it is even a book and a testimonial of me and my rent on the world. It is an annexe of my imagination which is an annexe of my mind, and a physical, public proof that I was here.But I recall clearly those times when we had no cameras (digital or other) and I can't quite remember what that must have felt like. Not having a daily reaffirmation that "this was a real girl, in a literal property/ In every sense empirically true!" must have been perfectly normal. When I feel at my photographs, or those of my parents, I can place a 15-year hole when the pictures of any one of us are about a rarity. Towards the end of primary school, and all through high school and university, I almost don't exist, photographically speaking. The reasons why this was the case don't worry me much (and, in any case, they are light in my head which, in a shamelessly Marxist manner, traces the phenomenon in motion to the unfavourable financial conditions brought around by the socio-historically induced economic instability.). What fascinates me, though, is a peculiar look we receive in the few photos from that period: a spirit of disarming innocence, vulnerable decency, unassuming awareness of being photographed. When someone took a picture of you, you'd stop your life temporarily, in recognition of the importance and unselfishness of the photographer's gesture; taking photographs had a certain solemnity to it - it was for "posterity." My faces in those few photos offer up an uncomplicated modesty I care I will never make again.The outdatedness of those faces "contracts my heart" - Larkin again - in almost the like way the mere look at around a dozen letters from my father does. Letters written during the mentioned socio-historical debacle, letters which I had almost certainly understand when I received them, but then promptly pushed out of mind. Letters I kept, and carried with me across the ocean, but letters I never need to study again. Letters which, unlike the cosy nostalgia-generating old photos, stick a finger into the eye of a raw grief.Now, it's all too loose and more fake with photographs - at least, in my case. Taking photos isn't about stopping life momentarily, but on the contrary, recording it as it goes. A photo isn't an image any more; it is an atom of a process. It is not trying to detect its seat in something larger than itself; it is pointing tirelessly and always to itself, period.And I know it - this new opening to repeat and suck up the minutiae of your spirit in the almost continuous award of the photos. What I know, though, is that the sense of being suddenly seized by the plainest sympathy at a single glance at one of those rare old photos is irreplaceable. And what is still beyond irreplaceable, what is truly precious, is the irreducible fullness of life live in all those missing, never-taken photographs.