A few weeks ago, I visited my parents out in the suburbs---and, as any dutiful granddaughter would, I also trekked over to my grandparents' house to bow obeisance and exchange polite small talk.
(To be really clear, I don't actually object to this. Their world is small, hemmed in by my grandfather's profound memory loss and my grandmother's mobility issues, declining cognition---visiting with them costs me nothing and makes them happy. But....well. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.)
Anyway, while I was there, my grandmother pulled out an old photo album of hers. There are a handful of pictures from her and her siblings' childhood, others from the brief period when she was a single gal in the city (she interned for a branch of a federal agency, spent time in Washington DC); plus a handful from her marriage, and when she was a young school teacher. She can name every person in every photo, even the schoolkids! It's an amazing map of her memory.
But what stuck out to me---and sticks out to me now, as I look through/edit my sister's wedding photos---is that the less-than-perfect feels realer, truer, and more emotive than the perfectly staged shots. I have lovely shots of my sister and brother-in-law, perfectly posed; but what I love is the slightly blurred, too-flushed photo of them about to kiss. I like the photos of my grandmother poised and well-dressed at someone's wedding---but I love the photo of her with her girlfriends, perched on a wooden fence beside a cliffside and them laughing, squirming, faintly fuzzed around the edges.
"Grandma," I said to this 80+ year old woman who only mostly remembers who I am, "you're so cute!"
"Oh, well..." she tried to demur, though I could tell she was pleased.
My mother likes posed phone camera pictures---everybody smile, hold it! type shots. What I love are the photos where the subject has not figured out that you're about to immortalize them. They're just laughing, or teasing; their mouth is open, things are flushed, there are folds. To look at images of human beings being human is worship, in my opinion. It doesn't make a difference whether that image is a bunch of 20-something women in 1950s Washington DC or a 20-something Midwestern couple in the 2020s. Either way, the humanity is unchanged.
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