Precious Photographs
Precious Photographs
The other day I was at an aunt's house for a visit. In my childhood, visiting relatives was a familiar and pleasant activity. (The highlight, I confess, was the nashta that was served during the visit.) But these days, particularly with traffic jams and hectic lifestyles, visiting relatives has become a luxury for Dhaka denizens.
In any event, I was in for a pleasant surprise. The walls of my aunt's flat had many beautiful paintings. Both my late uncle and my aunt were art connoisseurs. Their collection includes work by many of today's famous artists before they became famous. Off to the side on one wall were a group of old photographs. Coming closer, I recognized one. It was my aunt's mother - my grandmother's sister - who I used to call Didimoni. I had taken the photograph twenty-five years ago.
I recall the day I photographed Didimoni in her son's house in Paribagh. I was living abroad and visiting Bangladesh during the winter. I photographed her not just because she was the remaining sibling of my grandmother, but because I had adored this affectionate lady since childhood. When I showed up with my camera, I posed her and my uncle's family in the bright winter sun and took the pictures on black and white film. Returning to the US, I processed the roll of film – along with many others I had shot during the trip – and picked a few shots for enlarging in the darkroom. I suppose it must have been during my subsequent trip home a year later that I handed the enlargements to the family.
My aunt had framed the old 8”x10” photograph and placed it next to other old family photographs. For a moment I was thrilled beyond words. Then a kind of humility set in. I was grateful for the opportunity years ago to create something of such value to my aunt that she had framed it and placed it on her wall near her prized art collection where she could see it every day.
I started wondering, too, about photography those days. True, it was infinitely harder to make a photograph. But perhaps because of that we strived to make each click of the shutter count. After developing the film, making contact prints and making test prints, we finally had the end result: the black and white photograph, sheer magic. I wondered whether my photographs would have been better or worse if I had had a digital camera in my hands that day in Paribagh.
Photographs have a million different uses. They document reality and communicate news. Sometimes they are collected as art (at high prices, too.) Businesses use them in many ways. More recently, photography has become an instant window into the lives of people we stay in touch with. Thus we celebrate with the old class-friend whose daughter just got married, look wistfully at a cousin's South America vacation or rejoice in the birth of a niece's daughter – all on Facebook.
But for me, the most precious photographs are those which show us our family, our lineage and our posterity, and thus ourselves.
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