On Grief and Capturing Memories

Photographs are the closest thing we have to permanent memories. Alternatively, photographs capture a the details of light that can’t change due to age, context or existence. Once we are gone, so too are the memories we have. A photograph lets a memory live on without us. It provides a peek into what the shooter thought was significant, something they would want to reflect upon. With a photograph, you can add clarity to an existing memory; perhaps you forgot the color of the sky that evening you proposed to your wife, or how the city looked 30 years ago when you moved into your first apartment. Photos can also bring back memories long forgotten, those buried under our day-day experiences, or superseded by fresher memories. Scrolling through the gallery on your phone or a photo book from a trip are ways we reflect on past experiences.

Then again, how many photos are too many? At what point do you become stuck behind the camera, rather than an active participant in the moment? When do we decide the mental memory is more important than the physical one? The summer of 2024 was a tough one for me and my partner. A close family friend had been battling cancer for a few years and finally succumbed to their illness. Only 3 days later, we had to unexpectedly put down our dog Kuma after 11 years with her due to some traumatic circumstances. We both shrank into ourselves, overwhelmed with emotions.

As we began to grieve, I began to question the clarity of my memories. I turned to our digital photo repositories, trying to find comfort in the permanence and clarity of a photograph. We adopted our dog Kuma in the spring of 2013, in a time when social media was more dispersed and developing, and cloud storage was still relatively expensive. We found photos all over our digital histories, from Google Photos on our early Android phones, to Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. I also had more “serious” photos taken with my Nikon D5000 DSLR stored in Flickr, and even some in random Google Drive folders. Also, in the era before ubiquitous cloud storage, I had stored photos on random SD cards, USB drives and even hard drives.

As I began to consolidate all the photos of Kuma into one location, it still didn’t feel like there was enough media. There seemed to be moments just out of grasp that should have been captured by a lens, stored in media other than my mind. Searching the tag “Kuma” in Google Photos (the app we decided on for storing the albums) shows approximately 800 photos and videos. Is that enough? It still doesn’t feel like it. Scrolling through the albums, each photo brings up a memory and a hit of dopamine. How many before the feeling dulls? In the digital age, with unlimited storage, I can just keep adding, scrolling, repeat. Should we attach meaning to every photo? To me, there is a spectrum, one photograph carrying significantly more emotion than another, but my wife finds different meaning in different shots than myself. Do we just keep them all?

As a habit, I go through my Apple photos reel and Flickr account and delete photos that didn’t elicit significant emotion from me. Maybe I didn’t like the framing, maybe the composition was too busy, or maybe the photo was just a mundane shot. But sometimes I will keep something that is poor “artistically” because of the moment or context it was taken. There are many One Shot Stories and similar articles here on 35mmc that expand on this idea. Shots out of focus, cut off, under or overexposed. As I worked through my grief I began to question my choices in deleting so much. Is there some memory long forgotten that would have been unlocked? Some moment in time that was more significant to my wife than me? On the flip side, having so much choice might be dulling the shine on some of the great memories. Quantity or quality, the age old question.

Fast forward to January of this year. After hours on PetFinder, my wife and I decided to meet a puppy. Thirty minutes later, and she was in a basket in my lap coming home with us. After the initial shock and anxiety of raising a puppy wore off, I found myself snapping photos of her all the time. My iphone is clogged with pictures of Penny sleeping, playing, looking cute. I have photos of her on my dedicated digital cameras, on 35mm, and even on medium format. And she has only been in our family for three months! Have I answered my own question?

Did I use this space selfishly to show off pictures of my dogs? Possibly. Did I also use this space to work through my grief? Definitely. Do I hope you take away something from these musings? Absolutely.

You can find my work on instagram or Flickr 

Share this post: