Hi, friends - my microphone is on the blink so just a post to read today. As longtime subscribers know, we stick to a pretty strict editorial schedule here at the Blue Million Miles and I wanted to get this out before I’m able to rejigger my recording setup. Anyway, here it is. Thanks as always for reading.
All I have to go on is the photograph, so let me describe it to you.
In the foreground a child stands at the edge of the water, or just in it rather. The receding wave up to her ankle. Her back is to the camera and she looks to her left, out over the water and across the frame, in the direction of a great blue heron, not ten feet away, who has just taken flight. At such proximity it is both awesome and awkward, the heron. Its wingspan is enormous. Its neck and legs gangling below. And the child posture suggests astonishment - the head tilted upward, as to the heavens, the shoulders tensed, arms braced. And all of this in the golden light of dusk.
Dauphin Island, the image’s metadata informs. Pelican Cove, to be more exact. 6:23 pm.
I witnessed this encounter. I shared in it, reacted to it. I must have. Must have followed my daughter as she followed the heron up the beach, stalking it. Gleeful to be this close and for so long before it took flight. But when I think back, it is only the photograph that I remember. Only the photograph that I can remember. When I call up this memory, this ecstatic moment, what comes to my mind’s eye is the photograph. There were moments before, moments after surely. But they are gone. Supplanted. The continuous flow of life in all its sensuousness — the soggy ocean stink, somehow still enticing; the grit and give of sand underfoot; the sunburn itch; whatever we felt and said or didn’t say in the stunned magic of the encounter — all of it is gone. What’s left is the photograph.
Sally Mann, that extraordinary chronicler of family life, writes about the paradox of photographing those most precious to us. When we outsource the work of remembering to the camera, she explains, “our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished” even as - or especially as - we turn the lens on our loved ones, the ones we most desire to remember.
When we release the shutter with the lens aimed their way, we preserve that sliver of time to celluloid or pixel but we also apprehend them - and us - from time’s current.
If you take enough photographs of someone, Mann suggests, eventually they become the person. “I don’t have a memory of [my father]; I have a memory of the photograph.”
Bullshit, I said when I read mann’s book Hold Still. A photographer’s affection to raise the stakes and the code of their craft. This cannot be so. Alas, it is so.
My cup runneth over, I say when I speak of that evening on Dauphin Island, of our swimming in the bathwater cove and the golden light. And then the coming of the heron. Beautifully strange. Sublime almost. A moment that reconciled me to the wonder of the world and all the creatures in it, reconciled me as one of the creatures in it. Immersed. Afloat in time’s current. That’s what I say. That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I insist. An indelible moment. It must be. For I have the photograph to prove it.
It is all i have to prove it.