Looking through the lens

Photographs have a lot to tell. Your happy days, your fun days, your crying days and fussy days, everything that dots the colourful journey of your life from childhood to present day, all preserved on glossy paper. Every time you go back to albums you can almost plot your life captured artistically through the lens. They are instant nostalgia evokers, sometimes so powerful you remember things long buried. They bring a smile, make you cry, amaze, and astound you by their simplicity. Black and white or coloured, they floor you with the details that the lens captured—those dress patterns and hair styles, those younger and fresh faces now wrinkled and weary, those smiles and glances that plays out the nuances of relations and their equations —it tells you more than the mind ever remembers.

Pictures with family members, some long gone forever, some forgotten in time, puts into perspective how much we have lost and gained. When you look back at pictures from your childhood, an inadvertent smile creeps up. You stare at a younger version of yourself looking back at you, smiling so openly, not yet affected by the worries of the world. You can only wonder on what brought about that look. What were you thinking at that time? How did you go from being that carefree soul to the ‘you’ you now are? The photographs capture everything—the closeness of siblings, the struggle with weight and appearance, the warmth of family and friends, and you cannot help but compare that life to the one you’re living now.

Not all old pictures make you smile. Many simply embarrass the socks out of you ,while others make you cringe—that unkempt look after a boisterous game, that mad-hatter pose, the one where you’re caught staring at food, the one with the weird hairdo, and of course that perfunctory nude picture. I just don’t get the obsession parents have with showing off their kids au natural. Without fail, every album from any set of friends carry that one embarrassing naked pose and for some, awkwardly so, several more.

Recently, my cousin shared a few pictures of my siblings and me that he had in his collection. I had no recollection of ever posing for photographs like these but there we were, all four of us sitting on the sofa and grinning at the camera my uncle held. I couldn’t help but grin back and then stare some more. I noticed that each one of us had our feet on top of each other, toes up in the air, big toe to big toe. I went back to some other snaps and noticed the same thing. Amazing. How alike we were to each other, even back then, more than we seemed to realise! Then I noticed some more things, like how we girls had our hands firmly gripping the hem of your dresses. Only one person could be the reason we were so careful—Nana. My grandma, would constantly be on our cases to make us sit properly and act like girls. And my brother?  It made me realise how much and why I used to absolutely adore him. He looked like a cute little mouse, and I remembered that I loved him so much that I once hid him in a basket of hay so that no one could take him from me!

Looking back at photographs can unleash a wave of emotions, some pleasant and a few unpleasant, but there is no denying that it awakens something in you. It makes you wonder if you realised then how precious you were to someone, how loving you were in return.