Distant Waves

A picture is a secret about a secret.  The more it tells you, the less you know.

- Diane Arbus

I have an old photograph of a young girl and her mother, their temples pressed lightly against each other as they face the camera, artfully posing for the picture.  The photograph was taken by my grandfather, and my mother and grandmother are the models.  Grandma is all smiles, clearly enjoying the moment.  My mother, however, is not as enthusiastic.  She looks sad and world weary far beyond her five years.  Her eyes have a distant look, and the corners of her mouth are turned down.  The first time I saw this photograph I was a young girl myself, just a few years older than my mother was when she posed for the picture.

Ma had hundreds of photographs depicting her life growing up in Latvia.  Most of them were taken by Grandpa, who was a gifted amateur photographer.  Many years later my mother expertly pasted some of them into albums, either thematically or chronologically. The rest were kept in large, shallow boxes.
I loved riffling through the pictures and looking at the childhood and adolescent versions of my mother’s side of the family.  In the two decades before the Second World War photography wasn’t the digital point-and-press hobby it is now. The photos Grandpa took were almost always carefully set up, so that everyone had lots of time to smile and look camera-ready before the shutter finally clicked and whirred.  My aunt and uncle, who were my mother’s younger siblings, and my drama queen grandmother invariably seemed fine with having their picture taken.  My mother - not so much.  Even when she was all dolled up especially for the occasion, she didn’t smile.  She usually bore the look of someone who couldn’t smile on demand because she didn’t smile much at all.
I spent a lot of time trying to find pictures of my mother with a smile on her face; even the Latvian equivalent of a “say cheese” grin would have done.  There were a few of her as an adolescent that looked as if she was making an attempt at it.  I guess by then she’d noticed that people tend to look better when they look happy.  She eventually improved at smiling for the camera as an adult, perhaps because she was a beautiful woman and knew how to work it to her advantage in pictures. 

It may be true that the camera never lies, but it also hints at untold stories and secrets.  I intuitively knew that as I searched to understand my mother’s reluctance to put on a happy face.  I wanted to unearth the story beneath the photograph’s glossy surface.  Those photographs taught me how to make connections between the past and the present, the seen and the unseen.  What I felt in my bones fascinated me far more than anything I could plainly comprehend with my ordinary senses.  Pictures may show what happened, and even how something happened, but they seldom reveal why.
Over the years I eventually realized that the photograph of my mother and grandmother was the proverbial picture that’s worth a thousand words.  Although that significant picture isn’t typically defined as synchronicity, it was a sign that pointed to a future my mother would one day share with me.
That photo speaks to me now more than ever.  It’s a constant reminder that I can’t change the past, and if I want some control over what happens in the future, I must pay attention to the present.  That’s strong advice from an old photograph that whispers secrets I’ll never know.  But I'm still listening. 
-g.p.