Photographs record and shape memories

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an alternative spring break program, working… I recently had the opportunity to participate in an alternative spring break program, working for Habitat for Humanity in Hawaii. Nobility of the cause aside, I wouldn’t have been too interested if we had been building houses in Ohio. We still had plenty of time to participate in the conventional vacation experience. I gained a lot from the trip, most notably the experience of living and working in the closest proximity imaginable with nine complete strangers, resulting in many wonderful memories. Yet as I reflect on the trip, my most vivid memory is that of pulling my camera out.

I used three rolls of film during my week in Hawaii. As I continually found myself deliberating over what scenery and group arrangements were worthy of documentation, I subconsciously tried to create a version of the trip that hadn’t really happened, capturing only the images that would foster all of the positive things I wanted to remember — none of the bad times. As the Robin Williams character in “One Hour Photo” observes, “nobody takes pictures of something they want to forget.”

My worst nights of the semester, when I would come back to my room after a failed test or doing badly in a soccer game, I would find comfort in the friendly prom and graduation pictures lining my wall, longing for those happy times when all was right with the world. Of course, I never took a picture of all those days of complete embarrassment and teen angst that dominated the majority of everyone’s high school experience. Is this practice of selective remembrance deluding? Is it foolish to believe we could hold on to parts of our lives gone past by using a tangible object such as a photograph?

When I was younger, I would always wince with annoyance at how my dad invariably insisted on taking endless pictures at not just every family function or holiday, but even during mundane moments on a daily basis. I thought he should focus on living in the present, rather than preserving it. Wasn’t he wasting his time by meticulously arranging pictures in chronological order in scrapbooks for hours on end?

It’s only now that I’ve left most of the familiar faces of my life, that I understand my father’s thinking. It’s now I that am annoying my roommates with my incessant snapping of pictures at the most seemingly trivial of moments. I now see that even those moments are ones I am going to treasure eventually. As I begin to forget the last names (and first) of my casual friends from junior high and am no longer able to recall if I vacationed at Rehoboth or Dewey Beach when I was 12, I want to ensure that I never forget the things that truly matter to me.

My attempts might be as futile as Jim Carrey’s desperate run through his quickly disappearing memories in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but I think we owe it to those beautiful moments of our lives to resolve to never let them fade away, whether it takes a photograph or diary or conversation with an old friend to do so.

My friends often chastise me for being “stuck in high school,” in terms of my mindset and the fact that I can’t let myself completely let go of my feelings for a particular girl from my past. I just can’t accept the concept that “out of sight, out of mind” is a positive philosophy. Why would I want to forget the best day of my life? Because of how my life right now can’t compare? I’d rather have the memory to treasure. It might be logical to move on, but just what are we moving toward? Are we to discard future memories if things go sour? Whatever demons might eat at me, I know that they exist because of how wonderful and special my memories have been. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want my life to change. I want it to evolve.

Daron Christopher is still trying to get Hawaiian sand out of various bodily orifices. E-mail him suggestions at djc14@pitt.edu.