Photo Graveyard

Photos are scattered across my living room floor. Piles, slightly askew, marking different places in my life- be they time or geography. Me with straight hair smiling and scar-less. Me as a toddler, chubby legs and the same fat cheeks. Me in South Africa, wasted down to bone after my car accident. 

Me post-accident, in Swaziland

I pulled them all out with the hopes of bringing order to the chaos. For years my mother has tried to coax me into making scrapbooks. She bought one for my high school graduation, I bought one when I returned from the Peace Corps. They both have strong beginning, they have pictures and journal entries pasted inside. But a few pages in, and the glue stopped, there are photos slipped between the pages with a hint of my intentions. And then at the end it all tapers off…first to a page filled with photographs without a common theme or message and then no photographs at all. 

I grow bored. I become irritated, limited by my horrendous handwriting and too lazy to transcribe everything to the computer so it can be printed neatly. So the books sit on shelves, a half memory of a time long ago.

My mother encouraged the scrapbooks because she understood I wouldn’t remember things forever. I scoffed to myself, how could I forget such important events. But important as they were, they have been crowded out by so many other things. Other events, other cities, other people. Hell, some of it was knocked clean out of my head from an accident – some blotted by a desire to forget.

My high school bestie

I pulled out the photos on my floor the day, and traveled back for a moment, into the space of the places that are captured in those glossy squares. The ones I remember clearly. The ones that hit me roundly in my nostalgia. Sitting with my head on the shoulder of my best friend in high school. We spent so many hours on that couch. More hours talking…about what…we have no idea now. 

There is a photo of me dangling by a bungee cord over the Zambezi River.  I remember the exhilaration of actually jumping off a bridge- ignoring every survival instinct in my body and hurtling myself, arms spread like wings, toward the horizon. I remember the exhilaration morphing to pain as the cord settled and I dangled from my ankles while I waited for them to pull me to safety. And of course I remember the Egyptian man who told me, as I walked back to the starting point on the bridge, “you have the most magnificent scream.” And I did.

There are so many photos, my first boyfriend hugging me close at New Year’s, 10 years after our first kiss, my college friends, my Peace Corps ones. My family. 

Staring at them I understand and don’t, why we take them. I love the moment of love and joy and even the tinge of sadness that is embedded in each one. The memories that shock me back in time and then propel me back to exactly where I am, sitting on my couch flipping through pictures.

I don’t know what to do with them all.

Arranging them into books feels so strange. I heard an article on NPR a few months ago that talked about how in a recent year we took more photos than had been taken in all of the years before. All of them. 

My grandparents, back when folks dressed for photos

We used to arrange our photos into books because they were select and special. We arranged them because they were, if not quite few, at least precious. A smattering of baby photos, some family shots on vacation.

Now I have pictures of a friend sitting on the beach, a bunch filled with sand dunes (trying to get the perfect angle), one of friends piled on a single chair for no particular reason at all. 

I can’t imagine who will look through these. I can’t imagine they will be cherished like the two black and white photos I have in frames of my grandparents. Pictures taken back when folks dressed for the occasion. Or like the school picture I have of my father when he was 14. We have so many pictures to choose from how will any of them stand out as special?

Partly I feel lazy. Some images I have seared into my heart, never to be forgotten even years later. There is no picture of me saying goodbye to Ess at the airport. But I can see it so clearly. Too clearly, it hurt so badly I can recall not just the image but the pain itself. Palpable. No camera was necessary.

But you can’t share a memory the way you can share a picture. The exactitude is lost in a sea of metaphors in speech and the pieces of the moment we tuck away and reserve just for ourselves. Photographs tell a seemingly whole story- even if it isn’t always complete. 

The reality is these photos will go back into a box. A little more orderly. Possibly with some notations of dates or geography, but back into the box where they belong.

Visiting a picture

Champagne lake, Rotorua- New Zealand

An abstract oil painting. It looked like something someone rich would hang on a wall and swish wine in front of while boring friends discussed the merits of the bold color choices and nuanced brush strokes. The picture was the cover art on my New Zealand travel guide; I was determined to visit that spot (Rotorua) while I was there. I couldn’t tell you why, other than something that beautiful in nature was something I wanted to witness firsthand. And so a few weeks before I departed from New Zealand for good I found myself intermittently holding my breath (it wreaks of sulfur) and gazing at the art of nature. Rotorua is flush with all sorts of bizarre colors and designs. Boiling mud and sulfur smelling winds that colorful designs are stamped into my brain even all these years later. It is a memory I have because a picture lured me to that spot.

I’m susceptible to suggestion, photos of the Danakil Depression inspired me return to Ethiopia. It wasn’t the only reason but it was one of those things I was determined to see. The alien landscape rich with color and texture. Everything I read talked about how dangerous the journey, how hot the temperatures, how volatile the region. All of those warning were drowned out by the possibility of experiencing the landscape of science fiction movies in real life.

I never made it. It was the wrong time of year, too hot. Too dangerous. And so it lingers in my mind, in my imagination. This place that is real to me only because I saw photos that urged me to seek it out. Some mystical image acting as lure. If it were audible it would be the tune that I hum without realizing I’m humming, always there on the edges of my mind.

Recently, the desire to go to Turkey emerged and would not be silenced. I don’t remember every talking about Turkey until it became the only thing I talked about, edging out Brazil and Mali. I’ve been researching the local food of various regions. I’ve become obsessed with Turkish breakfast and have steeled myself to at least try Turkish coffee. 

In between websites dedicated to Turkish cuisine I ran across a picture of Pamukkale. I don’t even know how it happened, but all of a sudden I was gazing at what appeared to be iced wells clinging to the side of a mountain. It was immediately familiar. Something I’d seen before although I don’t know when or where. However I saw it, I didn’t realize it was in Turkey until a few weeks ago. 

Danakil Depression (http://www.sefere.net/place/danakil-depression/)

So now my attention is turned from Istanbul, and cooking classes, and cruises, and baths…to Pamukkale. I don’t even believe there is much to do there. I haven’t read that it is a place that must not be missed. But something about the pictures stirs me. Something about the beauty of the clear water in calcified wells cluttering a hillside is something I want to witness. 

It feels as if it could be a quieter version of Victoria Falls. There was nothing to do there but lay down beside the thundering water, droplets clinging to my hair, and sleep to the lullaby of raging water. There was nothing to do there but sit. Watch. Listen.  It is still one of the most beautiful places I’ve been. More than beautiful… it was powerful; something pictures can’t convey.

I hope to sit on the lip of one of those calcified puddles in Pamukkale, dangle my feet in it- if permitted, discover the view looking out. Maybe the breeze will be warm on my face, the water cool on my skin, the birds light in my ears. Maybe the vision in reality will match the one in pictures…I doubt it, the actual is almost always better than the imagined.

What photos say

Dusty feet, torn dress, beaming smile. Round belly, smudged face, big eyes. 

Closing my eyes I can conjure the pictures I’ve taken, and not taken, from my own travels. The little girl in a village in Uganda, petrified by the pale skin of the American interns- hell, scared of my peanut butter colored skin. She ran from me initially, but when confronted with the blonde hair and almost translucent blue eyes, she reached for me, clung to me, even as she cried. I was the lesser of the evils but some unknown evil nonetheless.

Part of me wishes I had a picture of that moment. Some part of me wishes I had a lot of pictures of random moments in the various countries I’ve visited and lived. But in recent years I have tried to be mindful of the pictures I take, of the stories they tell- whether I intend to tell those stories or not.

The most ubiquitous photos of the African continent are the quintessential animal/safari shots, the stark/lush landscape, and the disheveled/adorable child. And as frequently as there are photos of small smiling children, there is inevitably a picture of a white/western person holding them or their hands, crouched down at eye level or in some close proximity to that child. A clean person. A smiling person. A well fed person. And harmless as that photo is in the moment, it perpetuates a host of thoughts and expectations and narratives about a continent that already has too many “others” communicating stories on its behalf.

So for me, the picture of the “African” child is the hardest for me to take. Weighed down by the potential untruths or half-truths or full truths with no context that I am spreading, I find it difficult to snap a shot of a smiling Ugandan, Liberian, Ethiopian, child in anything that resembles the stereotypical narratives that already saturate our understanding of those places.

We are inundated with narratives every day without realizing it. We absorb starving and squalored “norms” like breathing, without realizing we are doing anything at all. And so we come to believe that Africa is a place that only knows elephants, famine, and war. There are no cityscapes, not cars- save safari jeeps, and no elegant dining. There is no middle class, no internet, no university.

 

When I returned from Uganda my niece’s teacher invited me to talk to the fourth grade classes about my time there. I pulled together a slide show that focused on wells and potable water in the villages – a story that in many ways keeps with the narrative of rural and poor African nations. A true story but not the only story.

My first slide wasn’t of a village or even a well though; my first picture was of the Kampala skyline. 

When I asked the kids where that picture was taken, they guessed wildly of American cities. And when I told them that modern-looking city was in a country in Africa they looked surprised and then absorbed it…just like that. Their teacher on the other hand, she seemed to struggle with an Africa that looked more like Houston than the Serengeti. The difference, she’s been absorbing specific ideas about Africa for far longer than the kids. That photo contradicted what she’s been taught – often passively – about the perceived singularity of African life. 

But the kids…the kids haven’t yet. They are still early in what they are consuming and so it is possible for them to understand the world not in absolutes but in shades of gray. I want their understanding of the African continent, and Asia, and everywhere in the world, to be nuanced and textured and layered. Taking pictures of little kids with running noses and dirty feet doesn’t do that, unless they are displayed beside photos of kids dressed in prep school uniforms in front of spotless cars. Without the later, I find it too difficult to shoot the former, the perpetuating harm is mostly inadvertent but still too great.