I remember one of the first times I held a camera.
It was my great-great-grandmother’s one hundredth birthday party. The whole family was there. Cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, the whole shebang. As a four-year-old, the world seemed so huge and full of new, incredible mysteries. At this particular party were two unbelievable wonders: my cousin’s huge, gold, angelic-sounding harp, and my grandpa’s heavy, flashy black digital camera.
It must be a sign of my lifelong nature of being a tactile learner that I don’t so much remember taking any pictures or watching my grandpa take any, but instead I remember so distinctly the feeling of scrolling that huge wheel with my small thumb to look through the digital album on the back of the camera. I loved the tiny joystick to zoom in, then the glee when my grandpa let me delete a few.
I’ve always been crazy about family history. I think that culture and heritage are such important factors in our lives, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand mine. Family impacts you in a way you can’t really describe with words. The people you have around you day to day, and those that leave the biggest impact on you . . . that’s family. Whether blood related or not.
My family are all artists.
We love to create, to think outside the box, to look at God’s beautiful creation and spin it in our minds and with our hands until something clicks. My dad is a potter and handyman, my sister draws incredible, photorealistic drawings, my brother is a graphic designer and talented videographer, my mom loves her fiber art, and we’re all musicians. This list goes on. Me; I’m a painter, photographer, and writer. I’m a tactile learner, a hands-on maker of pretty things. I craft words to convey what’s going on in my brain. I use color and texture and light to influence moods and memories. Photos are just one of the avenues I use to express these many, many facets of my love for the world and people and God and His goodness.
It may just be a bunch of pixels on a screen, or some ink on a paper, but to me a photo is much deeper than that. It’s a split-second capture of something that we try so desperately to commit to memory. When your child runs across the beach, hair flailing in the wind, sand clinging to their bare feet, you try to remember every second of it. The salty ocean smell, the cool breeze, the warm setting sun. Photos are a slice of that memory. When you see it, suddenly you’re transported back to that moment.
When I held my grandpa’s camera for the first time at age four, I think I knew, deep down, that there was something special about it. I could see my extended family gathering for pictures, smiling and laughing, exchanging memories and jokes, and I knew that those moments would be frozen inside that camera for generations.
And that’s just it.
Creating something tangible, something visual, that can stay around for generations to come . . . That’s why I do what I do.
I never want to lose any memory of my family. I want them all to live on in my mind forever, and even though my memories will become faded and inaccurate with time, I’ll always have those photos to go back to.
I hope you allow me the honor of capturing those priceless memories for your family, too.