Somewhere in the bowels of my parents’ basement squats a large, plastic Tupperware-esque tub. It isn’t labeled; so if my parents ever make good on their threat to donate all their unclaimed junk to the Purple Heart, some stranger is going to become the proud owner of the collected memories of my life since age 12. The tub is the current home of my unlabeled and/or un-put-into-albums photographs, and since I haven’t put a picture in an album since, oh, say, junior high, the tub is sizable. I’m loathe to give exact numbers, but let’s just say that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then I have a cool quarter-million-word narrative awaiting my attention.
I’m not bragging about this; I take no pride in my huge numbers of photographs. I mean, sure, if they were good or artistic or funny, maybe I’d try to casually drop somewhere into conversation the fact that I have almost 3000 photographs in a box. But I’m not a very good photographer. I have no real “eye” for subject matter, nor do I have an intuitive grasp of lighting and composition. No, what I do have is a problem, an unhealthy obsession with recording on film the minutia of my life. You know that phrase, “Take a picture, it lasts longer!”? I actually do it. Yeah. It’s not so funny when it’s the controlling neurosis of your life.
The coming weeks just might make my already-bulging tub overflow. The end of the year tends to be one long knee-jerk series of photo-ops for addicts like me. I already have four rolls of film sitting on my desk, awaiting the time when I have the money to develop them, and it’s not even May yet. There are awards ceremonies, graduation and last-hurrahs of all sorts looming on the horizon, waiting. “Jennnnnnn,” these events say to me. “These are the best years of your life, Jennnnnnn. Don’t you want to remember it all, minute by minute? Better bring an extra roll of film, Jennnnnnn.” And, arms outstretched, eyeballs turning in a swirly pattern, I obey.
“A four-pack of Kodak Ultra, please. I just need a little something to get me through the afternoon.”
It goes without saying that the Kodak Ultra will be misused. For example, I know that I won’t want three copies of the same shot of the same three people posing in the same spot. I know that there are only so many permutations and combinations of photographs you can take in one night when you’re with five other people in the same place. I commit these sins for a reason, though. I’m no math major, but I do know a little something about the law of averages, and the law of averages says that if I take 15 pictures, there is a good chance that in at least one of them everyone will be looking the same way, no one will be picking their nose and my hair won’t have blown into the shot. Usually, the law of averages works in my favor, and I have one or two really nice frame-or-album-quality shots on a roll. Logically, I should throw away all the “test” shots and keep the nice ones, but somehow, once a throwaway shot has been developed and preserved in glossy 4-by-6 format, it has a kind of sacred quality to it. I can’t just toss it aside: It’s a record; it’s a document; it’s a link to a happy moment that can’t be discarded just because I have double chins or because the flash didn’t go off and you can’t, technically, “see” anything. Photographs are the best evidence I’ve ever come across for the theories of animism: I don’t think those theories that the camera takes a little bit of your soul are all that far off. I want to remember myself in all of those stupid daily routines, and anytime I might think otherwise, the significant events come up and I’m back in line at Full Exposure, looking for a hit of 400-speed.
In the end, the 45 blurry pictures of graduation will get thrown in the tub, along with the 17 out-of-focus snapshots of the senior picnic and a roll or two of hazy pictures taken at bars, parties and in the Voice office, pictures where someone is making a hideously unflattering face or my thumb is over the lens. They’ll join the pictures of my 16th birthday party, the Christmas pictures, the summer’s worth of pictures of my little sister standing beside innumerable moose statues. They’ll sit there, all of the rejects, the ugly pictures and the duplicates that I would rather cut off a limb then sacrifice, my messy, complicated portrait of four messy, complicated, amazing years.
Jennifer Ernst is a senior in the College and an associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. She resolves to put her pictures in albums every New Year’s.
