Retrospectives

Last week, my boyfriend tested positive for Covid and, despite waking up next to each other that morning and sitting across from each other while he took the test, I moved into the living room and optimistically held onto my negative test result. Something I’ve come to learn about myself is that I can be optimistic to the point of delusion; I have yet to determine whether that’s a bug or a feature of my personality. In this case, it was just sort of a bummer. Of course three days later I tested positive too. (Obligatory: it was mild, we are both fine, all is well.)

During our brief period of living apart, I decided to pass the time by trying to finally finish an old project - organizing digital photos and ordering prints for my neglected photo albums. I hadn’t ordered prints since, apparently, 2018. Because of the pandemic, I’m not sure how much really happened that was photo-worthy since then, but there were some vacations, notable nights out, and holidays that, to me, deserved the full matte-finish treatment. 

I love photos. Real, developed, physical photos. I love organizing them. I love putting them in albums. I used to write individual captions for each one. Now I just give a date and place, and sometimes a caption if I feel particularly witty in the moment. The digital shift in how photos are taken, and shared, did not affect me for a long time. I still printed every single photo I took - now with my phone - well through the 2010s. But eventually everyone, even a semi-luddite like me, has to move forward with the times. For me and my photo albums, moving forward meant realizing not every moment is a Kodak one, and if I decide to make it one anyway, it’s OK for that moment to live on my phone only. 

The photos I took before Facebook and Instagram entered my life were deliberately chosen. That’s not to say they were all masterpieces. This was an era in which I was primarily in my 20s, after all. But, even the nonsense photos were posed and taken for reasons that mattered at the time. For one, disposable cameras only came with a finite number of snaps per roll of film. For another, carrying any sort of camera around - digital or otherwise - was cumbersome. I had to decide beforehand whether I’d take photos on a given night and carry the right purse accordingly. As a result, my physical photo albums are selective histories of who I was and what I did. More often than not, in an average week or month, I was probably home reading or watching TV. According to my photo albums, my life was rich with social activities and never boring. I printed every photo I took because every photo I took was worth printing. 

There is a gap in my physical photo albums where my shift to sharing photos on social media began. I stopped printing photos as often because my digital albums were what I’d cleverly caption and document now. Those albums were meant for others to see, not just for me. At a certain point, my printed photos became exclusively family functions with long gaps in between. Almost everything else that would be considered my personal life became shared on social media only. I continue to take selfies (occasionally) and pictures of food and sunsets, and they all have a place, in moderation, in my digital world. My current photo project is aiming to re-balance the private and the public, and once again give my physical albums a more complete version of my life that they had always reflected. Now, however, the camera roll on my phone forces me to make a decision - is this moment really worth preserving? Not every photo I take is a photo worth printing anymore. 

Meals and sunsets eventually become interchangeable, but we share them to share them, not to save them for ourselves, and I think there’s a comfort in that too. Social media has split us all into a public and private self, but more than anything, it lets us share with each other where we are in the present. The photos we post are not meant to be returned to for future nostalgia. Now, every moment is documented because it can be, and it’s left to us, to me, to edit my own life the way I want my photo albums - the ones just for me - to look. It’s a level of self-reflection that I am not always prepared for. 

A pandemic-era routine that I’ve come to love is Friday Night Retrospectives in which my boyfriend and I chose a director and watch their entire filmography, week by week, with a bottle of wine at our side. (We’re about to embark on John Carpenter next, so we are in for a wild ride!) Among my favorites so far is Nora Ephron, who also happens to be one of my favorite writers. Nora Ephron is considered the “queen of rom-com,” and I tend to agree, but something that surprised me during her retrospective is how few rom-coms she actually wrote and directed. They make up a very small percentage of her filmography, which was mostly a mix of straight-forward comedies and crime/corruption stories. Many of her films were even mediocre, which I found fascinating and inspiring. That any woman in Hollywood, let alone one starting out in the ‘70s and ‘80s, was allowed to be mediocre and still succeed is quite heartening. (Her final movie, Julie and Julia, is arguably among her best, and it’s hard not to wonder if she would have even gotten there if she wasn’t allowed to rebound after her mid-career flops.)

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about these retrospectives and the satisfaction of being able to watch a person grow and evolve in real time. Where they begin, how their time and place and culture mold their perspective, how they challenge and embrace the world around them. I think about this as I organize events from my former lives from my 2022 perspective. I’m creating a retrospective of my own life, a mixture of a public and private self, that will outlive me. This is what I'll leave behind, to whom I don’t know, but it’s what will tell my story. 

I used to think people who regularly pulled out old photo albums were discontent with their present. The need to look back was their way to re-live a perceived better time. I don’t consider myself a nostalgic person, so my own love of collecting and looking at old photos used to confuse me. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, as my other queen, Joan Didion, told us, then it’s also true, at least for me, that I look at old photos in order to feel present. That was a thing I did. That was a way I looked. That person next to me meant the world. These things, too, are my life. Even the meals. Even the sunsets. Even that mundane thing I found funny once and don’t remember why now. It’s all me, the mediocre and meaningful alike.  
 

FUN STUFF

What I'm Reading: Mrs. March by Virginia Feito (psychological suspense)
What I'm Watching: Severance (brilliant sci-fi drama on AppleTV)
What I'm Listening To: How Did This Get Made? (gem of a podcast!)
What I'm Eating: Häagen-Dazs Strawberry Ice Cream straight out of the pint