Yesterday my boyfriend and I took our two dogs to Lynch
Park. It was a beautiful fall day and because there were two of us* I could
take pictures of the fall day** and my dogs and him. “Please don’t take pictures
of me,” he asked. I replied that I was
taking pictures of the dogs and he was just there to hold the leashes, but of
course that was not entirely true. After all, it’s not just the dogs I love,
and so it’s not just the dogs I want to take pictures of.
In my opinion, it is almost impossible to take a bad picture
on a beach on the North Shore. This is even more true in the fall. Just point
your phone and click and you will have something worth looking at. It may not
observe the rule of thirds, but so what—it will still be a picture of something
beautiful. This—combined with the advent of phones that are cameras connected
to the Internet—is why I started to take pictures of everything as soon as I
moved to the North Shore.
I have countless pictures of friends walking on the beach in
the fall of 2009, of other people’s dogs, of Bass Rocks, my niece and nephews
and swans swimming in the river in Waltham***.
Sometimes I took these pictures because there was something I wanted to
capture or something that made me happy and sometimes just to remind myself of
where I had been and what I had done.
These days I mostly take pictures of my dogs and those
pictures are mostly in the house, with them at rest. This is because it is
pretty much impossible to take pictures of anything while I’m walking them and
I can’t imagine taking a walk for pleasure around Beverly without them. So my
photos are much less interesting, but I still have the urge to take a picture
when I see something I love—even if that thing is Daisy, curled up on her dog
bed and I already have 500 similar pictures.
I have often wished there was someone else around me with my
photo-journalistic impulse so that in addition to 1,000 pictures of my dogs
with my boyfriend, there would also be 1,000 pictures of my dogs with me. This
is not because I’m vain—it’s because I love them and I want to record that they
love me.
At the same time, even though it makes me sad, I can
understand my boyfriend not wanting me to take his picture or not wanting me to
share his picture on social media because he doesn’t like the way he looks
right now. I look at the few pictures that are taken of me and think, “I look
old” or “I look fat” or “is this what other people see when they look at me?” This
doesn’t make me wish for fewer pictures of me however—it makes me wish there
were more. If I saw myself more often as others see me, it would be less of a
shock.
I had a dream early this morning. In it I was standing
outside of a house that had just been intentionally collapsed. Even though I
knew it was going to be collapsed, I had somehow failed to retrieve my
belongings from it before the collapse. Fortunately, they were all in the
attic. I dug through the top of the roof to find broken panes of glass and
broken frames with layers of ripped pictures****. There were pictures from college and pictures
of my sister and me as kids. Somehow I knew (because this was a dream) that
there were also all the albums of photos of us as kids in there somewhere. But
I couldn’t find them, no matter how I dug.
As I woke up I thought about how those pictures would one
day be found by some future archeologist who would get to watch my transition
from object in the earlier pictures to watcher in the later ones—starting with
the imperfect attempts to capture my adolescent point of view.
*As opposed to just me, trying to keep control of 130 pounds
of dogs of dog-mass pulling in two separate directions
** I was not the only person taking pictures that afternoon.
There were about four other photo shoots going on (one bridal, one student
taking fashion shots, one family taking pictures for their Midwestern brag
letter and one engagement shoot.) I had never been somewhere and seen so many
more people intent on having their picture taken having fun than of actually
having it.
***Picture taken when I had to go there to interview
employees in a restaurant for my first big grad school paper.
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****In my family picture frames are reused and the previous
pictures left in them, so if you take out the back, you can see more pictures
behind the one currently behind the glass
