Project 365: An Ordinary Life
“Cheese Asa!” my daughter commands, not to her brother, but to me. She’s pointing at my camera, and demanding to take a picture, to push all the buttons, to “cheese” someone. I quickly memorize all my settings before letting her tiny fingers fiddle with dials and press the shutter 80 times as she points the unfocused lens toward someone’s legs. I’ll delete all but one of them later. I have a whole folder on my computer of pictures that Asa has taken, and it seems that I need one for Mira’s creations, too. Most of them are terrible, but occasionally there’s a beautiful surprise mistake hiding in the files for me to find later.
This is how I learned, too. Not when I was two years old, but when I was eight. And not with a digital camera that Mom could easily erase, but with film. I would point the little Vivitar around my bedroom and take pictures of everything I wanted to remember. I documented my room every time I moved the furniture around. I took pictures of each month on the calendar (that feels like a waste of film, in retrospect). I felt the pull to document the mundane when I was still single-digits-years-old, and that grand urge has led my life for more than 30 years. It’s only through this 365 project that I’ve gradually started to slow down, and not just document for the sake of documenting, but to find and remember the beautiful pieces of the everyday.
I’ve slowly begun to cull down the spray of clicks, from a fire hose to a gentle drip, recognizing what is beautiful and will be cherished later, rather than feeling the frantic pull to remember every detail of every scene. Maybe I don’t need to remember the exact toys they played with each day. Maybe an outfit is just an outfit. Or maybe an outfit is a superhero costume that is worn backwards and forwards and inside out, to the store and the cousin’s house and even on the airplane, with desert dust on the feet and a new crack in the eye cover. Maybe that superhero costume needs to be remembered as the grand theme of a vacation. Along with the skinned knees of a dozen new playgrounds and the glazed eyes of too many hours of tablet-watching.
This is why I photograph. Because when it’s over, it’s over, and as soon as it’s over (whatever it is - a vacation, a phase, a life), the memories immediately start frosting over with rose-colored glass. I want to remember the beautiful. If you want to remember the beautiful in your own life, reach out. I can help you with that.
