Snapshots don’t receive the love and affection they deserve. Snapshots, those quick photos dashed off with little thought or planning. They are often out of focus, not level, too bright or too dark, and poorly composed, if at all. Faded, bent, and torn snapshots fill equally faded albums and dusty boxes on the top shelves in closets. Snapshots are anything but “fine art.”
But that is, I think, precisely their value. They are not staged or rehearsed. They are, instead, moments of lives lived. They are unguarded and vernacular. They don’t pretend to be more than a statement, a statement that otherwise would have been lost if not for some unknowable drive that prompted us to take a picture. We are fortunate to have captured that statement, for now we can look back and immediately recall the thousand then insignificant details that now have so much more meaning.
An article in the NY Times argues for the value of the mundane moments, “Why Mundane Moments Truly Matter.” People forget the pleasures of everyday life in their search for the significant. But life isn’t those peaks of significance. Life is, instead, all valleys and plateaus and plains that get us from one quickly forgotten significant moment to the next. Life is not highlights. Life is the mundane.
I can’t look at these photographs and not be overwhelmed by all the recollections, the dog lounging on the patio to my side as we ate, the disappointment as we were denied a Danish, the nostalgia then and now for that well-stocked market with its wall of freezers.
These snapshots deserve more than an electronic purgatory on our smartphones or a quick deletion from our memory cards. They deserve to be printed, some quick note scrawled on the back, and thrown into a box or put into an album that can be stored on a shelf. That box and that album will be discovered over and over again, when somebody is looking for something else or when somebody is cleaning out the closet. And when it is discovered with its treasure of snapshots, it will bring pleasure and joy. It will be the opportunity for questions, reflections, and conversation. It will bring back to life a real life. It is how we spent our time, which is how we lived.
It’s time we started marveling in the mundane.