“The world feels different now,” my husband said within days of our daughter’s birth. “It is different. Because she’s in it,” I told him. How are we to respond to a world utterly transformed? The same habits of life are certainly not up to the task of honoring this new reality. This is, I think, a central part of the desire for documentation. Every moment – every smile and giggle – is profound. With each picture, a parent expresses a desire to capture and remember everything perfectly – to hold a moment in time which, even as we click the button, slips immediately from our fingers. Beneath this action, I think, lies a longing to honor a time of life that we feel and know to be uniquely precious. In all our business of pickling and preservation, we are laying flowers at the feet of moments of unutterable beauty, attempting to capture something true.

The ubiquity of cameras can make us miss the moment.