My daughter's friend came over one afternoon recently and she noticed one of my vacation albums on the coffee table. Excited, she reached for it and started looking through all the pictures. She asked a lot of questions about our trip and marveled at the organization and aesthetic placement of each photo and how they interacted on a whole. She confessed to be that she loved looking through albums. I listened as she talked about her love of seeing photos in print and I thought it was really interesting, considering she was born into the i-phone generation.
She has no memories of taking those tiny film tubes to the photo shop in the local mall, filling out paperwork, then leaving the film there for a few days until they were developed and printed. How many of you loved keeping those empty film tubes for loose change? Then you got the call that they were ready and you excitedly picked them up, finding a vacant seat somewhere in the middle of the mall, and opened the paper envelope, being careful not to let the strips of film slip out, then thumbed through the photos, marveling at the ones that came out good and wincing at the ones that focused on your finger rather than the subject at hand. How refreshing was it that this young girl, still a teenager, understood the magic of a photobook. She told me that she had spent some time at her grandparents this past summer and one of her favorite memories of her visit was when her grandmother took out her own wedding album to show her granddaughter. She described the way her grandmother's eyes lit up as she pointed out people she recognized, relatives and friends, and how she described the finer details of her gown and bouquet, and recalling the memories of what she remembered happening moments before or after a certain photo had been taken. Her granddaughter said that watching the animation on her grandmother's face, it momentarily seemed like the years had fallen away and she was once again that young bride on her special day. Photos definitely have that power to stop time. I had just recently taken out my own wedding album to show my daughter's friends, and even though my own kids have seen the album countless times, they all gathered around laughing at my husband's thick head of hair, my brother's impossibly young smooth face and my sister's bouffant hairdo that made her several inches taller than her natural height. I pointed out guests that they knew but never would have recognized and they cracked up at the way time had changed us all. But in looking at those photos, I, like my daughter's friend's grandmother, wasn't just looking at the photos. Each and every photo was like a portal to the past, a gateway to the memories of one of the most important days of my life. I didn't just see my sister dancing with me, or my cousin photo-bombing a family photo, or the moment the photographer took the most beautiful photo of my grandmother and I holding each other hands, her face beaming with pride and joy. I saw the moments before, and the moments afterwards. I remembered myself as a young bride, impossibly young, in love with the man that still makes me laugh every day. Photos transport us back to the times of our life that are worth remembering. They cause us to reflect on the past and think about the future. They make us laugh and cry, bring us both joy and sometimes sadness. Life is fleeting and years can feel like split seconds sometimes. Anyone who watches their teenager grab the car keys and run out of the house and still marvels at how just yesterday they were teetering around on chubby legs learning how to walk unaided understands what I mean. I still take that wedding album out once in a while and wonder how 25 years has managed to pass me by - impossible! - when I still feel like a young girl inside. These memories immortalized by photobooks are necessary. They remind us of who we were then, who we've become, and last but certainly not least, they are a source of entertainment to our kids who are always looking for new reasons to laugh at us.
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