No one wanted to give my mother the camera, but somehow she always ended up with it. Mom couldn’t be trusted to take our photo without giving our heads and faces the Picasso treatment: here was my older brother’s chin, a smile, and his prominent nostrils; this one included my dad’s face minus the upper-half of his eyes and the rest of his head. Every. Single. Time. We all wondered what was happening between when she looked in the narrow view finder at, what had to be our fully realized faces and heads, and when she depressed the shutter button to get a collage of features. Her photos should have come with a sticker: some assembly required.
It wasn’t like you could excuse it from having to work a complicated camera with manual focus and f-stops to consider. It was one of those popular, dummy-proof “point and shoot” Kodak cameras from the late-1970s and 1980s that resembled a small, thin black pencil box. There was a notch on one end on the top for the flash cartridge. I can still hear the popping sound it made when it went off, like the discrete crunch of stepping on a glass holiday ornament. I can still smell the whiff of heat and plastic.
It briefly crossed my mind that maybe my mom had developed a weird nervous tic just before clicked the shutter button. If that were the case, she should have gotten it an agent and taken it all the way to Vegas, so eerily consistent were her photo faux-pas. The setting or composition didn’t seem to matter either. Seated around a Thanksgiving dinner table or posed next to the Christmas tree, every occasion brought fresh photographic casualties. My older brother and I would be rounded up for a photo to mark the event, say, a lakeside picnic. Weeks and weeks later when the pictures arrived there we were from our sunburnt freckled cheeks down in our bathing suits looking as if we were part of some proof-of-life hostage photo, watermelon slices held up where the day’s newspaper should have been.
To be fair, in our family photography was more of an accessory than any kind of art form. Important events—holidays, birthdays, school recitals—were always dutifully and reliably documented with our compact Kodak and its stalwart flash cartridge. The pictures taken in darkened auditoriums of our school concerts or award assemblies were my favorite. They are so shamefully grainy and dull, punctuated by blurry, light forms they look like something out of an amateur ghost hunter’s scrapbook. A camera was a way to create a visual paper trail of our happily dysfunctional family, proof we could “act normal” like the best of them, if only for a hot minute standing at the base of the Lincoln Memorial on a family vacation.
My brother and I tolerated photographs as, like I said, part of all sorts of family and social happenings. To us, my mom’s shutter peculiarity made an already dopey ritual even more hysterical. We were kids. We hated having to stand still for anything, let alone having our pictures taken. That it got messed up on the regular gave us smug satisfaction. Well, yeah, you made us put down our Christmas presents for this! Photographic payback! Making it worse for my mom, who truly cared about all this stuff, was my brother who couldn’t resist sabotaging any photo meant to capture an important moment. Like the time my mom’s oldest brother, Bob, came to visit us from Alaska.
Bob joined the air force out of high school, got stationed in Alaska, and never left. We had never met him, but had heard many stories about “the black sheep” of the family. It was a pretty big deal when he happened to be in the lower-48 with his girlfriend and reached out to ask if he could drop in. My grandparents (my mom’s parents) were living with us at the time, which made the whole affair even more emotionally charged. Already in their 80s, this was probably the last time they would see their eldest.
The photo of me and my brother that memorializes this historic occasion was not taken by my mom (stakes too high!). Uncle Bob sits at the dining room table, leaning slightly to make sure he’s in the frame. I’m standing in front, smiling in that cheerfully dorky way kids do when they hear the cue: “Say cheese!” My brother is seated between us. Just as the person pressed the shutter my brother cocked an eyebrow and stuck out his tongue. It’s possible whomever took the photo didn’t catch it. My brother had impeccable delivery with those kinds of knucklehead antics.
I only know that when we got those pictures back, I thought my mother was going to vaporize with rage, which says a lot. My mother is a classically even-tempered, good-natured kind of person with an astonishing capacity to absorb other peoples’ garbage and remain relatively sunny. The few times she has been roused to real anger have not gone unnoticed. Resigned with the one funky image of her wayward brother and children, she eventually made her peace. For a long time it sat in a frame on a table near the entrance of our living room, which you had to pass on your way to the bathroom. This mattered with my brother was a teenager and had friends (including GIRLS!) over who couldn’t avoid noticing it. Who’s claiming payback now? Our mother: master of the long game.
We were dumb and insensitive and couldn’t see that her ineptitude when it came to this one particular part of her wife and motherly responsibilities (who do you think performed the tedious and thankless task of dating those pictures, putting them carefully into each of our albums, or tucking them in cards and letters to send to relatives?) actually made her frustrated and feel less capable. Afterall, she was hardly alone in a generation of women who opted out of paid work to be unpaid homemakers and mothers. Getting to show off her growing family should have been an easy reward for a choice that ended up with accolades few and far between. She’d make a joke about it as well, but then she’d sigh and click her tongue and shove the pictures back in the envelope: her version of unfit for sharing.
By the time I was a teenager, I had my own camera—still film-loaded, but not as embarrassingly ancient as that slim Kodak. I have photos of cast parties, marching band trips, prom, and graduation. Fortunately whatever was going on with my mother was not genetic; everyone’s heads and faces developed on film exactly where they should be. But at some point it became less important to me to lock in a record of what I was doing and who I was with, and I became more interested in taking photos of shadows crawling up the sides of buildings or a line of kayaks resting along a dock like multi-colored sardines.
I started to get interested in using my camera as more than a functional tool like a pencil. It became a way for me to get outside of myself and notice the world in different ways. I’m happiest behind the lens where I can observe and think and feel small and a little awestruck at the incredible things I see in ordinary places.
And to me, that’s still the best reason to lose your head.