By Prabhneet Kaur
A famous American landscape photographer Ansel Adams once said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it”. I couldn’t agree more. My mobile phone is always full of pictures, some random, others that have sentimental value. And I hold on to them now more than ever. If I categorise the important ones, they can come out to be of three kinds:
With some people, my relationship today has got a lot stronger than before. Old pictures with them often bring a smile on my face. I keep re-sharing them on social media every now and then, sometimes to the point of annoying the rest of the folks.
Then there are those people with whom things have changed a lot today even though the old photos have somehow managed to stay intact. Sometimes they seem strange to even look at. Just today while looking at one such picture, I was amazed. I was sitting so comfortably with a certain person, something I can’t imagine happening ever again. I am often reminded of AR Rehman’s song on such instants, that goes, “rishte badi mushkilo se bante hain yahan pe lekin tootne ke liye bas ek hi lamha”. It means building a relationship with someone from scratch needs a lot of work and perseverance but in order for them to break, a moment is enough.
On the other hand, there are those people too who you can’t see anymore, no matter how much you want to. The only memory left of them is in those pictures. I realised this at many points of my life. For instance, when my nephew was born, I was doing my masters in another city. He was the first child of our house after long and I was so in love with him. Looking at his pictures was my favourite pastime. When he died after four months, those very pictures became hard to look at. But I knew deleting them altogether was a mistake for I had no physical copy. We hadn’t even got the time to develop any as yet. So I posted all the photos on a site, visible only to myself, and wiped out my phone with a heavy heart. I thank myself today for having taken that decision.
Years later, in 2020, when I lost my father, I was not as devastated at first since I had been sensing the impending doom for quite some time now. But suddenly one day I had this thought: my husband had met my dad and had become a fan of him within a year, but my children tomorrow would never get to know their grandpa. They wouldn’t know his peculiar way of talking, his one liner jokes, and his cute smile. Even I would start forgetting stories related to him, the exact moments that happened not long ago. I might forget his voice and the feeling of security that I had when he was there. All I am left with now is his pictures. But that’s how life is: often cruel and unpredictable.
So photos, my friend, hold more value than you think they do. They need not be perfect; they just need to capture the memory of the moment to look at later with tears of joy or sorrow.