On Photographs and Time
Although incarcerated, he holds a photograph of his twin granddaughters, whom he has yet to meet. The image suspends their life momentarily so he can enjoy the festivities of their second birthday party.
“It is hard to believe how much they have grown,” he tells me in a soft voice, his tone sounding like he is smiling. By the time he is released, they will be four years old… maybe three, depending on new sentencing laws. He keeps a picture of himself from his childhood, around the same age as the girls, taped to a locker near his bunk. He stares into the little boy's eyes and wonders, "Where is he?"
An imposing reminder that the call is being recorded offers a snapshot of his darkened reality and the surveilled surroundings in which he resides. The interruption has no bearing on his reflection, and with the freedom of dreams, he inhabits the space more fully, lingering somewhere between who he was in the past and his belief in his better future. "I'm sorry, he tells the boy in the photo. I am going to do right by you. I know I've messed up, but I promise to do things right next time."
This tender moment softens his hardened edges, and I steady myself in the vignette and slow to his vulnerability. The photographs return him to himself and his dreams of beginning again.
I hang up the phone and walk to my bathroom. I open the medicine cabinet and gaze into the faces of the pictures I have taped to the interior of the mirrored door. Three versions of myself smile back at me: my first baby picture, my 8-year-old self, and an adolescent me. They hang there in quiet confidence, slowing down, remembering those parts of me that require honesty from my grown-up self in a simple practice of lovingkindness.
There is a sacred altar where the gaze of my former selves penetrates a deep part of me, where have they gone, where are they now, and how much of their musings do I continue to carry? Perhaps they hold wisdom I had gone in search of through the choices in my life. I pause - their whispering smiles reassuring me; they are the very bones of me, the soft flesh of my skin, and the dancing within my cells.
People are not different, and although lives vary distinctly, something ubiquitous remains at the core of being human.
I stand at the intersection of photography and contemplative practices to bridge this gap between our outer and inner worlds. Photographs invite us to rendezvous with our social biographies arrested within a frame. As an observer of the observed, I become increasingly curious about a photograph’s shifting relationships within time and space, and its power to return us to ourselves again and again.