Memory makings
Mid-capture, Midjourney
This piece was written as part of a course on creative non-fiction writing. The assignment was as follows:
Write a "snapshot essay," a short piece built entirely on the information you can gather from a single photograph and the memories it evokes.
She presses the camera to her face, presses the shutter button, and hopes. A second of sunlight enters through the shutter and sears the film inside with an impression she hopes will look like the one she sees through the viewfinder.
Back home, she carries her hopes in a light-proof canister to the film store. She waits a week. Then she picks them up and finds out which have been realized. Those are the ones she shows me.
This is one of the ones.
The setting is a beach, and in the image are the things you’d expect: sea, sky, sun (reflected), sand pocked with heel-prints. If I may presume to guess what got her hopes up, what made her unzip her camera bag, remove the protective lens cap, raise the viewfinder to her right eye, and press the shutter button, it was the umbrellas. They frame the tableau — big canvas umbrellas with alternating red and white segments, sprouting upright but askew from their sand soil, casting swaths of shade that protect chairs and towels, beach bags and beverages.
I was there that day, and I’m there again when I look at the photograph. Something about the suffused yellow softness makes it easy to go back. This particular depiction of that particular day feels romantic, if you allow that romanticism is willful oversight of the objective to privilege the subjective. This is an easy-access memory, paid for in terms financial and frictional by the relative un-ease of its creation.
A month later, the camera started to fail. First, it stopped taking. There would come a moment — she pressed the button, but nothing happened, and the moment passed. Later, the film got stuck, but she didn't realize; that roll amounted to 36 hopes dashed altogether.
She still brings her iPhone on expeditions, so she still captures moments, but there's no hoping.
They look less like memories.