I am so glad that I took the time to put most of our photos online. On a melancholy day, revisiting pictures of past experiences and feeling nostalgic is just what I need.
I smile the entire time I’m scrolling because most often the people in the pictures are smiling. The best photos are those where the subjects are not looking at the camera and don’t know that someone is taking their picture. Unsurprisingly, there are fewer of these than those where the subject is camera-ready.
Sometimes when I click on a photo, I think I’m recalling exactly what was happening. Other times, I have no clue about a particular photograph. Scrolling through pictures demands imagination in ways reading my journals—in which I recorded details of what was happening—does not.
Because it’s impossible to remember exactly what was happening when many of the pictures were taken, I find myself creating stories to expand the limits of what a photo can convey. These stories serve as stimuli for reflection with the added advantage of hindsight.
Through such an exercise of imagining and creating stories, it’s clear to me that our photo histories are likely completely disassociated from the reality of the moments when the images were captured. And for my purposes, that’s just fine.
Gwen Dungy 