I have photographed a lot of people in my life.
Artists, friends, strangers, people I have met for five minutes and people I have known for years.
But photographing someone you love is different.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently.
My father died a few weeks ago.
And suddenly photographs have acquired a different weight.
I have photographs of him.
Some good.
Some ordinary.
Some that I probably did not think much about when I made them.
That has changed now.
I look at them differently.
There is something strange about photographing someone you love. You are making a record of a person who is present, while somewhere in the back of your mind you know that the photograph may one day become evidence of their absence.
Perhaps we don’t think about that when we press the shutter.
Perhaps we don’t want to.
We photograph because we want to remember.
But memory is unreliable.
It changes.
It loses details.
A face that you once knew completely can become difficult to reconstruct in your mind. You remember the eyes but not quite the shape of the face. You remember the voice but struggle to remember exactly how it sounded.
A photograph seems to promise that this will not happen.
There they are.
Still.
Looking back at you.
But a photograph cannot give you the person.
It gives you a moment.
That distinction becomes painfully clear when the person is no longer there.
I have always thought of photographs as a way of holding on to things.
I am less sure now.
Perhaps photographs don’t allow us to hold on.
Perhaps they teach us what we have lost.
I find myself looking at photographs of my father and noticing things I had never noticed before.
The way he stood.
The expression on his face.
His hands.
The clothes he wore.
Little things that meant nothing when he was there because there was no reason to study them.
He was simply there.
That is the strange privilege of having someone alive.
You don’t have to memorise them.
You assume there will be another conversation.
Another visit.
Another photograph.
You think there will always be time to make another one.
Until there isn’t.
That has made me think differently about the photographs I have taken over the years.
Why did I make them?
What was I trying to keep?
Was I trying to preserve a person, or was I simply preserving my experience of being with them?
I don’t know.
Maybe it is both.
There is also something slightly uncomfortable about photographing people you love.
A photograph freezes them at a moment that they did not choose to remain in.
We know the photograph is incomplete.
It cannot tell us what happened five minutes before or after.
It cannot tell us what they were thinking.
It cannot reproduce the sound of their voice.
It cannot tell us what it felt like to sit across from them.
And yet we keep looking.
Perhaps because looking is one of the few things we can still do.
When someone is alive, looking at them is part of an ordinary relationship.
After they are gone, looking can become an act of remembrance.
I don’t know yet what these photographs of my father will mean to me.
Maybe that is too soon to know.
Grief has its own timing.
At the moment, sometimes I look at a photograph and feel close to him.
Sometimes I look at the same photograph and feel the distance between us more sharply.
Both things can happen in the same minute.
That is something photographs do very well.
They can bring someone close and remind you that they are gone at exactly the same time.
I have also started thinking about all the photographs I did not take.
The ordinary moments.
The conversations.
The meals.
The times he was simply sitting somewhere.
The things that did not seem important enough to photograph.
You cannot photograph everything.
Nor should you.
Life would become unbearable if we were constantly trying to turn every moment into a record.
Some things need to remain unphotographed.
Some memories belong only to the people who were there.
Perhaps that is what I am beginning to understand.
A photograph is not a substitute for memory.
It is one of the places where memory can begin.
It gives us something to return to.
But the person we are looking for is never entirely inside the frame.
My father is not in those photographs in the way I want him to be.
He is there, and he isn’t.
There is his face.
His body.
His expression.
A particular moment of his life.
But there is also everything outside the frame.
His voice.
His mannerisms.
The things he said.
The things he never said.
The ordinary familiarity of having him around.
That cannot be photographed.
Maybe that is why photographs matter so much after someone dies.
They remind us that a photograph was never meant to contain a person.
It was only ever meant to hold a moment.
The rest has to remain with us.
And perhaps that is the real reason we photograph the people we love.
Not because we believe we can keep them.
We know, somewhere inside ourselves, that we cannot.
We photograph them because we want to remember how it felt when they were still here.
I think I understand that differently now.
I am still taking photographs.
I am still looking.
But when I photograph someone I love, I know there is something I did not fully understand before.
The photograph will remain.
The person will not.
And that makes every photograph feel a little more precious.
