Photographs

I spent an hour or more showing my grandsons pictures. All of my grandchildren seem to love looking at photographs- of themselves, their cousins, places they have been, or even places they haven't been. What is it about photographs that is so fascinating? Is it the memories they evoke? Do we renew or even make new acquaintances with people and places through looking at pictures? Often people in photographs are smiling. In real life, the smiles don't last as long as the ones frozen in time by a camera. Places often look better somehow in a photo. When we were in Lithuania we tried to take a picture of the Soviet-era concrete apartment buildings to show how dismal they looked. It didn't work very well. The photograph looks cleaner and brighter than the real thing. There must be something about smells, sounds, and general feelings that we can create for ourselves when looking at a picture but in real life, we sense what is really there. Maybe we could try harder to make our real life like the life in pictures where faces are more relaxed and happy, surroundings are not so dismal.