Traveling with Memories
Returning from a trip during the winter months, especially from a place of warmth, always feels a bit surreal. Did the trip even happen, or was it some kind of snow globe fantasy like seeing images of Santa on the beach?
For me, one of the things that make a trip more real are the photos I take along the way and, to a smaller extent, the editing I do to those photos once I am home. But how often do I use my big mirrorless camera, and does having a professional camera mean that I should never use my phone?
Back before I had a professional camera, and even for a while afterwards, I would primarily use my iPhone to document adventures. Having a pocket-sized camera was fantastic, and I have many a travel memory encapsulated within the cloud. The problem was that I was constantly taking photos with my phone to the point that my phone became more of a memory than some of the experiences I was having. With images easily accessible on my phone, I also felt a deeper compulsion to share my photos on social media at the expense of enjoying my trip.
Of course, the desire to capture and post photos stems from the very human need to create memories and the fear of missing out on a particular memory is what largely drives social media, in general. It wasn’t until I started looking through my grandmother’s old photographs, after she passed, that I began to see the holes that photographing everything was creating in my memories.
My grandmother, Evelyn Bridgeman, loved photography, but more than that she loved memories. There were countless photo albums lining her shelves and stacked in her closets. She even converted her travel photos into slideshows and would put presentations on for the family. Her photos were incredible windows into the past, and I found them eternally fascinating. So what, I wondered, made her photos seem more tangible, more raw, more real than the images I was capturing on my phone? The answer, for me, it turns out, was intention.
It’s not that my grandma staged every shot she took, or that her albums weren’t full of candid moments secretly snapped. It’s that, by necessity, each shot was taken with intention. My grandma shot on film, at a time when developing photos wasn’t cheap. So, each and every click of her lens had to mean something, and the only way to capture the most meaningful photo was to pay attention to the present moment. As I was once taught in a photography class, there is a difference between a photograph and a snapshot - and I take that concept a step further and say there is difference between a moment and a memory.
The problem that I ran into when I used my phone as my primary travel camera was that, in the rush to capture memories, I was forgetting to live in the moments. I realized that every time I raised my phone I was taking myself out of the moment and, if that was the case, the memory better damn well be worth it. The obvious answer, it seemed, was to quit using my phone to document my trips.
I didn’t stop using my phone cold turkey of course, and I still use my iPhone to capture little snapshots of my travels. However, I find the deepest memories that I have are the ones I create with my actual camera. When I am out in the field I have to be present. What is the light like? What’s in the foreground, the background, the area of focus? What is my subject doing? How is it behaving? How am I changing its behaviour? What settings do I need to account for each of these questions and when do I take the shot? And when I finally do take the photo, it’s like a pinhole through time capturing that exact moment in pristine detail; and that moment, so dissected by my intention, so realized through my presence, becomes memory, thick with the liminal binding that holds fleeting moments together.
When I return from a trip I have a memory card filled with raw data that needs to be lovingly stitched back together to represent the moments that were captured, and that’s where my memories take on a new life. I remember the vivid colour of a bird’s feathers, the blue of the sky, and the golden hue of sunlight. I remember the moment I captured each and every photo, and I use those memories to reconstruct the details of the images I edit. My presence and intention in the moments when I took the photo help fortify my memories in hindsight.
I’m not sure if my grandmother felt the same way when she received a package of developed photographs; that’s a question I never got to ask her. What I do know, is that she remembered the story behind a vast majority of the photos she took well into her final years, and I think it’s that final piece, the story, that ties everything together.
For a long time, I felt like the story behind each of my photos could have started with ‘I looked for my phone and snapped a photo’, and ended with, ‘then I posted it online and put my phone away.’ Each memory was made up of the same beginning and ending. Of course, too much time behind a camera lens can lead to the same outcome, but I would argue that intention and presence help me mitigate that outcome. What I have found, by reducing my dependency on cellphone snapshots, is that the more I’m in a moment with my camera, the richer the story behind the moment becomes. When I used my phone to capture EVERYTHING, my trips ended up being like a surreal stop-motion movie of an imposter’s life. Each snapshot bled into the next until what was left was a phone full of moments I only half lived.
Over the years, I have used everything from disposable cameras to specialty iPhone lenses to capture memories; nowadays, I use a balance of my iPhone and mirrorless camera. The combo system, a hybrid of snapshots and photographs, come together to build the story of the places I explore. I think more about when to use my camera versus when to take my phone and, perhaps more importantly, when to use neither. I try to be present in each moment, and be intentional about where I point my lens, regardless of what I am using to take the photo. I still take bad snapshots of silly things, but now there is levity to those photos instead of an anxious hunger to capture, capture, capture.
When I think about my grandmother, and the photos she took, it helps remind me that not every memory needs a photo, and that sometimes less is more when it comes to capturing meaningful moments. While I am sure that my grandma would have taken more photos had cellphones been invented when she was younger, I’m not sure that they would have been as enriching as the precious collection she curated. With that in mind, I will continue to take photos, and snapshots, but I will also try to cherish the moments in between, because it’s the moments that make up my life story, and stories become the memories I pass on to others.
So, when you see my photos, remember that each feather, fin, claw and antler is steeped in memory, with a story behind each. Some of those stories you can see right in the photos themselves. And the others? Well, I’ll have to tell you about those myself.
