When I learned that I was pregnant with my first child – a daughter – I did what most citizens of the modern world do. I snapped a picture of a positive pregnancy test, creating the first photographic record of the new, precious life I now knew was growing within me. After the first few weeks of bliss at the discovery of my pregnancy, I quickly became very ill. What started out as normal nausea and discomfort quickly turned into trips to the IV clinic every other day in order to keep my body, and the delicate baby nestled within it, properly hydrated. I was diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare complication in pregnancy that causes constant, dangerous levels of vomiting.

While I was bedridden, my husband and I started to receive kind gifts in the mail from concerned and excited friends and family. As I opened the packages, a clear theme began to emerge. Calendars for important dates, memory boxes in which to keep ultrasounds and hospital bracelets, scrapbooks for one picture a day during the first year of life. Sunken into the sheets, hardly able to move, these well-meaning gifts felt like they accumulated into another list of “to dos.” The task of mothering was being made clear: it was a job which involved not only the carrying and bearing of life, but meticulous documentation. At the time, it felt like an absurdity that anyone, especially my unborn child, would want any detailed account of these months within the womb. Nothing in my life has ever brought me as much joy as the knowledge of my pregnancy, and yet I was in such a state of misery that it was difficult to imagine that not only would my daughter and I survive this pregnancy, but that as an adult woman she would delight in looking back at the memories of such profound struggle.

Contemplating all this, I pulled out my phone and snapped a grainy picture of myself on the way to the hospital to receive my regular dose of IV infusions. I was twenty pounds under my pre-pregnancy weight, my hair a matted mess, my skin a strange combination of sickly yellow and tanned by the New Orleans sun. I smiled half-heartedly and held up the pot I had brought with me to vomit into. I acquiesced to these newfound pressures, offering only a glimmer of defiance. I would do what it felt everyone around me wanted me to, but I would do it honestly.

Photograph by Anastasia Styagaylo / AdobeStock.

Since my daughter’s birth, the questions around documentation, photography, record-keeping, and memory have not resolved themselves, but instead taken on different forms.

“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 and precious. 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.

Images are powerful; they can conjure up memories and feelings which we thought had long been forgotten. For most of us, I think, this can feel like both a gift and a burden. I am in equal parts grateful for my own copiously documented childhood and, at times, swallowed up in the nostalgia which so many images, shaky camcorder recordings, and boxes full of relics of a bygone era can bring up. My generation’s childhood in the late nineties was, at the time, surely the most documented in human history, with handheld, reasonably inexpensive camcorders flooding the market. Yet it pales in comparison with today. As a modern mother with an iPhone at my fingertips, I am constantly being confronted by both the desire and expectation to capture moments with my daughter, and by the limitations of this act.

There is much to be gleaned and joyously remembered from an encapsulated childhood, but there are also times when piles of precious moments stuffed haphazardly into boxes in attics and basements can make the weight of one’s own history feel stifling and burdensome. The overabundance of these records can overwhelm us, reminding us of all that we haven’t held on to within ourselves. As memories re-surface, we become aware of all that has been forgotten, swept into the recesses of our personal histories. These astonishingly abundant means of preservation are a modern phenomenon that we all seem to still be making sense of.

As a modern mother with an iPhone at my fingertips, I am constantly being confronted by both the desire to capture moments with my daughter and the limitations of this act.

Up until the early 1800s, a rendering of a child was primarily made possible through painting or drawing, reserved mostly for the wealthy few who could commission such a thing or those children with skilled artists around them. Sometime in 1826 (or 1827, historians are unsure), after eight hours of exposure in a camera obscura, the light which filtered through the camera hardened the bitumen on an asphalt covered pewter plate which Nicéphore Niépce had carefully prepared. With lavender water, Niépce wiped away the unhardened bitumen, revealing the scene from his window of rooftops and trees in eastern France. “Sun writing” or “heliography” is what Niépce called it. This unassuming scene is the oldest known surviving camera photograph.

It is a miraculous image, in part because what it “truly” shows is unclear. The “light writing,” which captures a scene taken over the course of many hours, is free from some of the dangers of modern photography, unburdened by any sense of truly encapsulating the experience of a moment. The onlooker is given a sense of an impression rather than an immediately captured scene.

As photography boomed in popularity and availability in the mid 1800s, many people wondered how this new form would affect society, with particular anxiety and trepidation around the role of art. In 1857, Elizabeth Eastlake, an author, critic, and art historian, wrote in London Quarterly Review:

It is obvious … that however successful photography may be in the closest imitation of light and shadow, it fails, and must fail in the rendering of true chiaroscuro, or the true imitation of light and dark…. Nature, we must remember, is not made up only of actual lights and shadows; besides these more elementary masses, she possesses innumerable reflected lights and half-tones, which play around every object, rounding the hardest edges, and illuminating the blackest breadths, and making that sunshine in a shady place which it is the delight of a practiced painter to render. But of all these, photography gives comparatively no account.footnote

The ubiquity of cameras can make us complacent to the ways in which photography fails to capture what is actually experienced in any given moment. The camera, just like its ancestor, the camera obscura, fails to “see” what we see. This is true both in a technical sense and in a deeper, emotional one. To gaze at a picture is not to experience perfectly what that moment was like when we were “in” it, though it can certainly remind us of details long forgotten or bring up emotions anew. As Eastlake points out, all the subtle renderings of a scene which might even be captured more “truly” by an astute and feeling painter are flattened by the medium of the photograph. All artistic mediums possess their limitations, but in an age of endless images, it feels all the more critical to reacquaint ourselves with the bounds of our age’s reigning form.

At times it brings relief to know that the past is gone, uncapturable even by the most careful preserver. Our experiences themselves are too vast, complex, and unwieldy to ever be captured by any technological invention or expressed by any form of art. In other moments, it brings sorrow. Standing at this vantage – on a beach awash with a sea of photographs: old, new, and even the ghosts of future images and memories which, God willing, will come to pass – I turn my gaze toward “attention,” that rare and beautiful moment of complete God-given presence.

Simone Weil writes that, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I try to give myself completely to the unfolding of each moment with my daughter, now one and a half. As she changes before my eyes, there is always some grief in watching some precious aspect of her character fall away, seemingly in an instant. Her once delightful, joyously flapping cowlick is now a smooth, perfect seamless piece of hair, tucked in with all the rest. With each little death, though, there is also an ever-renewing bursting forth, which, when fully seen and experienced, fills me with a gratitude to God that is beyond words. To give my attention to this transformation and the person that she is now, in every moment, even as that moment transforms into the next, is no easy task. Pressing my finger against the shutter button of the camera, I hear my daughter’s giggle, then a click. Setting the camera down, I hold her in my arms, my nose against her cheek. I offer myself to her – all my imperfect, abounding love – and in this moment of communion, my life feels like a prayer.

Footnotes

1. Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 90.