The Photographs We Don’t Take
The absence of the photograph does not mean the moment was lost.
Gowher Bhat
We are usually good at knowing when a moment is worth photographing. At weddings, someone is always holding up a phone. At birthdays, everyone gathers around the cake and waits for the picture before the candles are blown out. On holidays, we stop beside mountains, rivers and old buildings, smiling at the camera because we know that one day we will want to remember where we were. We know how to photograph a beautiful day, but we are not always as good at noticing a beautiful moment when nothing special seems to be happening.
A mother standing in the kitchen early in the morning, still in her house clothes, pouring tea into two cups. A father sitting in his usual chair after work, his glasses low on his nose as he reads the newspaper. A child asleep on the sofa with one shoe still on. Two friends sitting outside a shop, talking long after they have finished their tea. Nobody says, “Take a photograph,” because the moment does not look important enough to save. It simply passes, and years later, those may be the moments we remember most clearly.
I sometimes think about the photographs that exist in our phones and the ones that exist only in our minds. The first group is easy to find. We scroll through them, send them to friends and sometimes forget about them, while the second group has no folder and no date. They return unexpectedly through a smell, a song, a familiar street or even a cup that has been in the house for years. Suddenly, you are somewhere else, sitting at a table from fifteen years ago, hearing someone laughing in the next room while your mother calls you to eat and your father complains that the tea has gone cold. A younger version of you is standing by the window, unaware that one day you will miss that ordinary evening.
There is no photograph of it, yet you remember.
Perhaps that is because we rarely understand a moment while we are living it. We know when something is a wedding or a birthday, when we are leaving for a holiday or when the whole family has gathered for a celebration, so we take photographs because the occasion itself tells us that it matters. An ordinary evening does not announce itself. You may be sitting in your family home while someone peels an apple at the table, the television playing in the background without anyone really watching it, the light outside slowly fading as someone talks about something that seems completely unimportant. You are tired and thinking about tomorrow, so you do not take a picture. Years later, you may wish you had.
I remember looking at an old photograph once and noticing something that was not supposed to be the important part of the picture. It was not a wedding photograph or a picture from a special occasion, just a family photograph taken indoors, with everyone sitting together because someone had probably asked them to look at the camera. But what caught my attention was the person standing slightly away from everyone else.
The expression was ordinary, the clothes were ordinary, and nothing about the picture suggested that it would become important. Yet I kept looking. There was something painful about seeing that person exactly as they had been then: the face was younger, the hair was darker, the room looked different, and things that had once seemed permanent had already disappeared. I found myself wishing there were more photographs like it, not posed pictures where everyone had prepared themselves, but photographs of life as it actually was: that person sitting with a cup of tea, laughing without knowing someone was watching, or standing near the window on an ordinary afternoon.
It is strange how, when someone becomes part of the past, we stop caring about whether the photograph was perfect. We only want them back inside the frame.
This is also why some people are missing from their own family albums. They are the ones taking the photographs. A mother photographs her children on their first day of school, at birthdays and during family trips. A father takes pictures of everyone standing together. An older sister records every celebration. Years later, the family may have hundreds of photographs, but the person who spent years preserving those memories appears in only a few because someone was always behind the camera. We should sometimes remember to turn it around.
Still, not every moment needs to become a photograph. There are times when taking out the phone can make us step away from the very thing we want to remember. A child runs towards you after being away all day, and for a second you think about recording it, but then the child reaches your arms and you forget the phone. That may become the better memory. A friend tells you something they have never told anyone before, and instead of photographing the table where you are sitting, you listen. A rainy evening begins during a walk, and rather than photographing the clouds, you both run for shelter, laughing as you arrive completely soaked. Some moments are kept not by cameras but by attention.
Still, there are photographs we almost take.
You notice your father standing in the garden in the evening light, and for a moment you realise that he looks older than you remember. You think about taking a picture, but he calls you over to help with something, so you go and the moment disappears. Or your mother falls asleep in a chair after spending the whole day looking after everyone else. Her hands are resting in her lap, the room has become quiet, and you reach for your phone before deciding to let her sleep. You never take the photograph, although years later you may remember that exact afternoon and wish you had kept a picture of it too.
That is the difficult thing about time. We assume there will always be another ordinary afternoon, another cup of tea, another visit and another conversation in the same room with the same people. Then something changes. A house is sold, a chair is moved, a child grows up, a friend leaves for another city, or parents become older. Someone who used to call every evening becomes busy with a different life, and the ordinary world we barely noticed becomes the world we miss.
This is why old photographs can hurt in such a strange way. They do not only show us people; they show us a world that no longer exists exactly as it did. A particular curtain, a schoolbag near the door, a familiar shawl, a cracked cup on a table or the old sofa where everyone once sat can suddenly bring back an entire room. You may not have noticed those things at the time, but when you see them years later, they become part of the memory.
Sometimes even a photograph of a road can do that. You see the road and remember who was sitting beside you, the conversation you were having, the weather, the song playing in the car and the place where you stopped for tea. The photograph shows only the road, but your memory fills in everything else. A photograph can preserve what we saw; memory preserves what we felt, and perhaps that is why the two belong together.
Take the photograph when you can. Take the imperfect one, the picture of your parents sitting at the table, your friends laughing when nobody is posing, your child covered in food after dinner or the old family chair before someone finally decides to throw it away. But when the moment asks you to put the phone down, put it down and stay there. Listen to the person speaking. Look closely at the room. Notice the hands, the voice, the light falling through the window and the ordinary details you may never see in quite the same way again.
We do not always know which ordinary moment will become precious later. The child asleep against your shoulder will grow up, the person sitting across the table will one day have grey hair, the house may look completely different, and the people who filled the room with noise may no longer be there. One evening, you may find yourself searching through your phone for a photograph that does not exist, wishing you had one picture of the kitchen that morning, one picture of the old chair, one picture of the person standing by the window, or one picture of everyone sitting together without knowing that, for a few minutes, life was exactly where you wanted it to be.
But the absence of the photograph does not mean the moment was lost. Some memories survive without proof, remaining in the way you remember a voice, the smell of tea, the sound of footsteps in a hallway or the feeling of someone’s hand resting on your shoulder.
The photographs we took may show us what life looked like. The photographs we didn’t take may remind us how deeply we were living it.
(STRAIGHT TALK COMMUNICATIONS EXCLUSIVE)
