The Grain of Memory

Inheriting my family’s film camera is a tangible reminder that the past stays with us, and has led me to reflect on how memories are made.

I am drowning in parenting advice. The stereotypical tips tell me how to get my kids to eat their vegetables, while the unexpected ones start worries I didn’t know existed, like whether I have the right kind of non-fiction to give a five-year-old. I have a thousand little responsibilities so their bones might weather eighty years and more, their hearts will stay soft, and by luck or chance they’ll have what it takes to ride the waves of the unimaginable future.

The madcap acceleration of social and technological change promises, or threatens, that what comes next will define us, that life lies in moving on and moving forward, into what brave new world rises ahead. Nevertheless, if we are who we will be, we’re no less who we were, balanced perfectly in the cosmic equilibrium of this age of the world between already and not yet.

As is the way with good advice, the best parenting advice I’ve received this year is simple, and good for all of life: remember what it was like to be a child.

1.

When I got married, my parents gave me a photo album of my life up to that day. It was a generous and symbolic gift, not least because as the years pass I realize how many of my childhood memories are tied to those photos. Is it me that remembers playing with a cardboard model of the Vancouver SkyTrain next to the swingset in the sun, or riding my Raleigh bike in the dry New Brunswick heat, or is my album offering up scenes for my mind to step into like a magical painting? If it matters, I can’t parse the difference.

I’m indebted to that precious collection: pictures make the memories we forget.

2.

Not long ago, the camera that took those photos also came down to me. My dad had bought this Olympus OM10 in the mid-1980s, when it was a quietly excellent workhorse among Japanese cameras, and it documented our family’s life for the next 20 years or so. When I reclaimed it during spring cleaning, there was still a fine grit in the focusing ring, no doubt the sandy legacy of summertime trips to Parlee Beach, NB.

It’s a good reminder that making pictures on film is a material process, a carefully calibrated interaction of finely-tuned mechanical parts, chemistry, and physics. The shutter springs open for a fraction of a second, letting in just enough light to react with a chemical emulsion laid on the film base, a process that hasn’t changed for over a hundred years. Even with a built-in light meter and reliable shutter, there’s no way to know for sure how a photo will turn out, and the vagaries of light and film grain are compounded by my amateur mistakes with focus and framing. The results are satisfying, imperfect like my memories.

Lens, shutter, developing chemicals, the materiality of it compounds frame after frame, until previous exposures lie like ghosts in the grain.

3.

Maybe artificial intelligence will write the future for my son and daughter. Who knows? This old analog technology in my hands reminds me that the past stays with us, even if only in pieces. I think the challenge for my children’s remembered childhoods, though, won’t be scarcity but overabundance. Smartphones give us a hundred pictures in a day until the sheer quantity of images blur together. Capable of keeping so much, I don’t want the infinite backup of cloud storage to let us remember less.

My camera offers an anchor in the real world for abstractions like inheritance, imperfection, and attentiveness, and I love the way it holds disparate things together. Here’s another one: photography is both art and documentary. What is worth looking at? What is worth remembering? The questions answer each other, so when I pick up that old camera, I’m not choosing. All I’m trying to do is invite those shy, flitting, beautiful moments down to rest on film, and to stay.

I know I can’t make memories; they’re too mysterious, too ephemeral, too multisensory to be manufactured. But that doesn’t mean I don’t make them, for myself, for my son and my daughter, as I try to frame moments durable enough to settle in film and memory. I hope they can see how it’s love that is developing me from subject to artist, because when I look at them, I’m not choosing.

Text & Photography: Joel Faber