There are four photo albums from my childhood, and they document, almost exclusively, birthdays, holidays, and a two-week trip to Portugal in 1994. What they do not document — what no family album I have ever seen documents — is any ordinary Tuesday, any of the roughly nine thousand unremarkable dinners that actually constituted the texture of growing up in that house.
A Childhood of Cake
This is such an obvious observation about photography that it barely qualifies as an insight: we photograph occasions, not duration. And yet the albums, over decades, come to stand in for the whole of a childhood in a way that quietly falsifies its emotional weather. Looking through mine, you would conclude I had a childhood of near-constant celebration, structured almost entirely around cake. You would have no evidence at all of the ordinary Tuesdays, which is where, if I’m honest, most of what I actually remember about my parents took place.
The Preferred Narrative
I’ve come to think the photo album’s real subject is not the past but the family’s preferred narrative about itself — the story it wanted preserved, edited by omission rather than falsehood. Nobody photographs an argument. Nobody photographs the year my father was between jobs. The album isn’t lying, exactly. It’s just answering a much narrower question than “what happened” — it’s answering “what did we want to remember wanting to remember.”
The album isn’t lying. It’s just answering a much narrower question than “what happened.”
The Unphotographed Tuesdays
What’s strange is how completely this selective record has come to stand in, in my own mind, for memory itself. I trust the photographs more than I trust my own recollection of the unphotographed years, even though I know, intellectually, that the photographs are the less representative sample. The bias runs so deep it survives its own diagnosis.
I don’t have a solution to this, other than to notice it. Somewhere in a drawer are the Tuesdays nobody thought to document, and they are, I suspect, more true than anything in the four albums — and entirely, permanently, unrecoverable.
- Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography.
- Hirsch, M. (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.
