[ This is Essay No. 32 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]

Every photograph comes with a story

By Neha Viswanathan

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It’s a ritual with my mother. When I was younger, I used to cringe when she brought out old family albums. As an adolescent, I found nothing precious in those photographs. To me, many of them were a testimony to bad fashion for children. The frilly frocks, the hair tied up in a ponytail right on top of one’s head, looking somewhat like a fountain. At some point my mother even had collages made out of them. It wasn’t till I was in my twenties that I could look at these photographs without squinting. And what a world it opened.

We forget everyday. We forget the precise flavour of the raw mangoes that we feasted over the summer vacations. We forget the colour of the skirt that was bought after much pleading. We forget how small and incomprehensibly tiny our joys were. Our memory becomes more and more selective. But with old photographs, I attempt to patch my memory. At some point I started scanning these photographs, which is a little harder than it sounds.

For one thing many of them were glued into the albums. This was before the plastic ones flooded the market. The older ones had thick black sheets on which you pasted the photographs with unforgiving glue. They were bound and thick. If you tried yanking them out, the photographs would tear. Since my mother threatened me with physical harm if that was to happen, I had to sit and patiently take these photographs off the black paper, little by little. When you spend that much time just taking one photograph out of the album, stories start to tumble. And I couldn’t help but ask. Where was this photograph taken? Do you still have that saree? Was my little sister really that cute? And were you so beautiful?

And then I scanned them. One by one. It’s at that very moment that I realized that these weren’t exactly my memories either. They were the sum of my parents’ memories over the years. This is how we must have appeared through the lens of the camera. The gaze of a parent is very strong. We didn’t pose for most of these photographs. In the days of film, you had to put great thought before you actually clicked. You had no idea how it would turn out. Each photograph had to do justice to that moment and place.

I dug further back, and found photographs of my parents in their younger years. Before they met each other. When they were still studying in school. Of course I knew that my mother had a childhood. And yes, she had told me stories. But nothing quite prepares you for the visuals of their early years. You cannot stop gasping at their youth. Even more wonderful were the photographs of my grandparents. These people who we know only as our parents or grandparents, they have these entirely different identities before we came in on the scene. Scanning these photographs, I didn’t just stumble upon things that I had forgotten, but things that I had never known. Every photograph comes with a story.

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Neha Viswanathan (aka nehavish) is an avid blogger and blogs at http://withinandwithout.com. She lives and works in London, and is an amateur poet and photographer.