Capturing a moment

Jan 03, 2008 - 01:34 AM PST

"A picture is worth a thousand words," which I discovered was true as I sat at my computer desk procrastinating about what I was to write for a short personal essay. The walls in my room are covered with millions of words if each were worth a thousand. My eyes slowly scanned my walls, thinking about each moment, time and place that the pictures had been captured. Each frame held a specific memory in time that I enjoyed with my friends, whether it be a karaoke night that I completely proved to the world that I could never be the next American Idol or a formal that I spent hours getting ready for. However, out of all of these pictures I had of the "good times," one drew my attention specifically; it was the picture that sat in the silver frame alone on a table near several candles.
As I studied the picture that was taken three years ago, I began to think, do photographs really convey true emotion? Have they ever? As silly as it is seems, why do we as society make people say "cheese!" before a picture is taken? Could it be because we sometimes fake a cheesy smile in the picture? Why should we smile in the picture if its not how we feel, the camera is not actually capturing the moment. While these thoughts raced through my mind, while continuing to think of an essay topic, I began to wander and my imagination placed me back into those rows of seats in the large Arena. About three hundred and fifty three chairs to be exact. The rows were in lines parallel to each other, each student sitting in alphabetical order by last name. My best friend since elementary school sat three chairs away, our names ending in the same letter; ironically her house was exactly three houses away from me through all the years that we had grown up together. Blue caps with tassels popped up by rows as we anxiously waited for the principle to call our names to "end one journey and begin another." I remember I stood up and tears started to flow from my eyes, I had no control over them. I looked at my "best friend" and wondered what happened our senior year?
Two months before the end of high school, my best friend Lauren and I, had stopped talking, the reason to this day I still do not understand. As children together we always fantasized what prom and graduation would be like and how we would share those special moments; the kind a camera could capture, together. I didn't attend prom with my best friend, and sat four chairs away from her while my nerves built up just wanting to talk to her. I almost missed my name being called from all the frustration I had, ending my high school career without the one person who had always been there for me. Soon after the ceremony had ended, I walked outside, my eyes as red as the carnation my mother handed to me when I nervously looked around to find my parents. My mom grabbed me to the side,
"Come on lets get a picture!"
She knew I had been crying and the last thing I wanted was to do was to be in a picture.
"Not right now, wait til we get home," I tried shoving her and my father away as they insist that I needed a picture the second I left the ceremony.
I didn't feel like arguing, so there I stood between my two parents, them being proud of me, while I stood in my blue robe and cap with a diploma in my right hand and a rose in my other, just thinking about how I wasn't talking to one of the people I thought for sure I'd have a graduation picture taken with.
As my aunt held the camera up to her eyes, reciting the lines "smile," I did. The moment was captured.
However, as I stare at that silver frame with myself dressed in blue robe and my parents grinning as if they could not be any prouder, I always remember that moment as a time I was truly faking it.
Concentrating on the idea of conveying emotion in a picture lead to me question why photographs had been invented in the first place. Did someone decide to take a picture of a bad moment in time, just because it was a life milestone*as my graduation was? I went online and began to "google" my questions I had about the invention of the photograph, again floating away from concentrating on a topic.
I had come to find that in 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was the first person to obtain a photograph and it took about eight hours to do so. This made me glad that it was my aunt taking my picture at graduation and not him, because I couldn't stand waiting eight seconds to get the picture opportunity over with, let alone eight hours! Besides this, I had also came upon that photography was first popular among scientist and artist, because scientist such as Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1800's could use photographs as a method to study both human and animal locomotion. Artist, similarly used photography to study the photo-mechanical reality of the nature of things.
With this information in mind, I began to look back at my picture sitting near the candles, the silver frame reflecting off of the light. Could you study the nature of humans from this picture? In a way yes, it's our nature to take pictures at important events so that we will always remember them. On the other hand, no, from looking at this picture without the story behind it and knowing my "one thousand words" that this picture is worth, you would think I was happy because I was graduating. The next time you look at a picture, maybe you'll think "what were these people thinking, and what was going on," or maybe you'll just think "cheese!"