the ‘wilde’ gray photo (a fragment)

Life moves pretty fast. If you don‘t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.

John Hughes

Do you ever find yourself holding a photo and yearning for something you can’t quite define or describe?

I tell myself this happens because the printed images I own are mainly composed of family photos and places I’ll likely never revisit. In my hands, these thin fragile slips of paper, these captured traces of light and time, evoke strong, poignant sensations of loss and longing. Why?

Printed images have no sound. They don’t move. They’re not like the things I absorb, see and experience (often with delight) on a day-to-day basis. Photos can be stained, damaged or faded. They can smell, tear and get lost. The ones we care about, the ones in frames hanging on the wall, most often end up with faded centers and darkened edges. Imperfect marks on a fragment of experience.

However, there is something otherworldly about these faded family photos and it isn’t that we all have them hung somewhere in our parents’ homes. It is that these photographs become literally marked by the specific spaces they inhabit. Even though these images forever depict a specific moment, the physical image, the paper it is printed on, bears the trace outlines of a particular passage of time. Printed images are unique in this way, they differ from online images, as they often have physical counterparts wherein comparisons can be made as to how their individual environments have altered them. Think divorce parents with the same photos hung on different walls, one in the shadows, the other by a window…

As a result, photographs, perhaps counter-intuitively, are two-fold mementos.  Though they are physical reminders of a specific moment, they are also unique witnesses to the passage of time.

What else have we kept since childhood that bears witness to these physical spaces? An old leather chair? A worn blanket? These things were meant to last, whereas paper is not.

Could it be that is where this feeling of yearning comes from?

Is it that these paper photographs exist on a fixed timeline. Ever ripening, ever on the verge of being loss, misplaced or destroyed?

Where once they were meant to be to be displayed for others, carefully chosen by family members to elicit fond memories of a coming of age, they are nevertheless forever on the verge of rearrangement, one family tragedy away from the imposed remembrance of something other…

I’m sure I’m not the only who has felt loss seeing a familiar photo put on display, somewhere, anywhere, other than their original, seemingly mandated wall space.

These printed images are much more than a simple reminder of the ethereal nature of the Moment.  They are the moments. As I write this, I cherish not the images of me that lined the walls of our family hallway on Gilmore Hill. I cherish the fact that my parents found something of my youth worth displaying. I delight in the fact that these younger selves saw me grow up. That they changed as I changed. That these pieces of me, these fragments of my youthful self, faded as I aged. A “Wilde Gray” Portrait if you will.

It feels right that these captured selves have altered over time. That the circles, hearts and odd prisms they were mounted in shaped their now somewhat random compositions into established perspectives. Chosen moments that now challenge all those that came immediately before and after that Kodak flash. Moments no longer seen or understood as haphazardly chosen instants of time but as invaluable and all encompassing samples of my youth…