The other day, without asking my permission, my phone decided to remind me of my own life. “Memories — Ten Years Ago.” It does this occasionally: selects a few photographs, adds music, and turns them into a little movie. Usually, it comes up with a trip, a birthday, or a family gathering. Sometimes, though, it decides that what my emotional well-being really needs is another look at something I ate in a restaurant back in 2016.
I opened the album. My wife and daughters at the beach, by a lake, in the mountains… A family lunch. The sea. Our house. A birthday cake. Another beach, followed by another restaurant. Several people I love and a sunset that still does absolutely nothing for me, although at the time I apparently considered it worthy of permanent preservation. I went through about twenty photographs. Everyone and everything was there. Except me.
THE INVISIBLE MAN
I went back to the beginning and looked more carefully. I wasn’t at the beach, I was missing from the dinner table, and I was nowhere near the birthday cake. I tried to remember those days as a suspicion slowly crept over me that, ten years earlier, I had been temporarily expelled from the family. Everyone had been traveling, celebrating birthdays, going to the seaside, and eating in restaurants, while I, judging by the available evidence, had probably been serving a sentence of house arrest. Then it dawned on me. I had been there all along. I had simply been standing on the other side of the lens. A man can spend half his life meticulously documenting his own existence and end up producing an archive that proves he never took part in it.
My complicated relationship with photography began long before smartphones. The first serious camera I ever held was a Soviet-made Smena 6. Everything was manual: aperture, shutter speed, focus, advancing the film. You couldn’t simply spot something beautiful and press a button. First, you had to make several important decisions. The strangest part was that even after making them, you still had no idea whether the photograph had turned out. There was no preview, no pinching the screen to zoom in, and no way of discovering that you’d cut off someone’s head.
I received my first camera as a reward for getting excellent grades at the end of a school semester. A Bereta. To me, it represented a major technological breakthrough. After every shot, the camera automatically advanced the film to the next frame. At the time, this feature seemed like the beginning of humanity’s robotization. I pressed a button, the camera gave a little whir, and it was ready for another picture. I could never have imagined that a few decades later, a phone would take photographs on its own, improve them, recognize the people in them, know exactly where they were taken, and then remind me once a year that I used to look better.
Before I took over, the family’s chief photographer had been my Uncle Duta. At family gatherings, he didn’t take photographs. He directed them. “You, a little to the left. Move over. Not that far. Come back. You people in the back, move closer. Don’t blink. Get that glass out of the way. Who put the child over there?” By the time Duta had arranged everyone to his satisfaction, the little one would be crying, someone would be getting sleepy, others would have lost patience, and the sun, which had been in the perfect position at the beginning, would have moved. Finally, Duta would raise the camera. Everyone froze. Click. And so the man who took family photography more seriously than anyone else spent years remaining outside the photographs. Apparently, I later inherited both his camera and his fate.
Photography, after all, was serious business back then. A roll of film held 24 exposures, or 36 if you were feeling extravagant. Today, we take that many pictures just trying to get one in which nobody has their eyes closed. Back then, every click was a decision. On vacation, you didn’t photograph everything you saw. A child on the beach — yes. The family in front of the hotel — yes. A sunset — maybe. Another sunset — don’t get carried away, we’ve still got yesterday’s. Nobody photographed lunch. No sane person would have dreamed of climbing above a table to photograph a plate of ćevapi from overhead. If, back in the eighties, we’d seen a man standing over his chair in a restaurant, trying to find the perfect angle for a plate of spaghetti, we probably would have called someone in his family. You came home from vacation with two or three rolls of film and felt as though you’d just completed a professional assignment for National Geographic.
THE FILM THAT WENT MISSING IN ACTION
Then you took the film to be developed and waited. Today’s generations would have a hard time understanding that. You took a photograph on Monday and didn’t find out until the following week whether it showed what you’d actually intended to photograph. Eventually, you received an envelope, pulled out the prints, and the family review committee convened. This one’s good. This one’s blurry. Someone blinked in this one. Everyone has red eyes here. Who’s that man behind us? And what’s this? A finger. Somebody’s thumb occupying a quarter of the Adriatic Sea. But photographs weren’t deleted. Even the bad ones ended up in the album. A blurry aunt, an uncle missing half his head, a child looking in the wrong direction. There was no Photoshop to fix them, and no delete button to erase them from family history. Perhaps that’s why those old albums were more honest than today’s digital ones.
My photographic career, however, reached its peak much later, when I was already working as a journalist. I traveled to another city to interview a well-known writer whose work I particularly admired. The interview meant a great deal to me, and I had prepared more thoroughly than usual. Our photographer wasn’t coming along. There was no need — I’d promised to take a few portraits with my own camera. The interview went extremely well. The writer was one of the few people I’d interviewed who insisted that I send him a copy of the newspaper when the piece appeared. He had enjoyed our conversation and wanted to see how it would look in print.
When the interview was over, I took out my camera. I was no longer a journalist. I was Uncle Duta.
— Maybe one over here. Click.
— Just a little closer to the window. Click.
— Excellent. Click.
The writer patiently cooperated.
— One more, just in case. Click.
I took several portraits and returned to the newsroom feeling very pleased with myself. I handed in my article and gave the camera to Rade, our chief photographer, so he could open it and remove the film. I didn’t want to take any chances.
A few days later, Rade invited me out for a drink. That was suspicious in itself, since the newsroom’s chief photographer wasn’t in the habit of buying journalists drinks to congratulate them on their photographic talent. We sat down. Rade waited until the beer arrived, leaned toward me, and said:
— Listen, I’m not going to tell anyone at the paper.
When someone begins a conversation by assuring you he won’t tell anyone else, what usually follows is information you’d rather he didn’t tell you, either.
— What happened?
— There was no film in your camera.
I stared at him for a few moments.
— What do you mean there was no film?
The moment I asked, I realized there weren’t many possible answers.
— You never put any in.
In that instant, I understood two things. First, that I had spent ten minutes pointlessly arranging a famous writer for a photo shoot. And second, that this had probably been the only photographic session of his life that had produced not a single bad photograph… Or a good one, for that matter.
Rade saved me from becoming the laughingstock of the newsroom. We agreed that the official version would be that the film had been damaged. In those days, this was a perfectly believable explanation. Film had a mind of its own. It could be exposed to light, get stuck, tear, or develop badly. Technology was unreliable enough that you could use it to explain away your own stupidity.
There was just one problem left. We needed a photograph of the writer. The internet was still in its infancy. There was no endless online warehouse of images where you could find a person photographed from every possible angle in seconds, including a picture of what he’d had for breakfast the previous Tuesday. We searched and eventually found one. The only problem was that it was about twenty years old.
And so the latest interview appeared alongside a photograph of the writer twenty years younger. The article belonged to the present, the photograph to the past, and the only man who knew what the writer had actually looked like during our meeting had no evidence whatsoever. I sent him the newspaper, as promised. These days, when I myself have developed a much greater appreciation for photographs in which I look twenty years younger, I hope he didn’t hold it against me too much.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LENS
In America, I lived to see digital cameras arrive, followed by smartphones, and finally an age in which nobody knows how many photographs they own anymore. I checked recently. There are thousands on my phone. My grandfather’s entire childhood could fit inside a shoebox, while my grandchildren’s preschool years require cloud storage. Today, we photograph everything. A birthday — two hundred pictures. A child jumping into a swimming pool — thirty-seven. A dog sleeping in an unusual position — six. Lunch — naturally. In just a few decades, humanity has gone from “Don’t waste the film” to photographing Russian salad from four different angles.
And the more photographs we have, the less we seem to look at them. Once upon a time, we’d take an album out of the closet, sit around the table, and turn the pages together. Today, we have thousands of photographs we may never see again, unless our phone decides one morning to remind us that we existed ten years ago, too. That’s how I found myself going back through the pictures it had chosen for me that morning, looking for myself. I made a timid appearance in a few, but far fewer than I’d expected.
I started checking events I knew for certain I’d attended. Family vacations. Well, I’d driven everyone there. Restaurants. I’d paid the bill, which is probably the most reliable proof of attendance. New Year’s Eve. I’d put up the Christmas tree. Birthdays. Day trips. Family lunches. Everywhere, the same pattern. If some future historian had only our digital archive to work with, he might conclude that my family had spent years traveling with a mysterious invisible man who drove the car, booked hotels, paid the bills, and occasionally shouted:
— Move a little closer together! Now smile! Thaaat’s it!
Then my phone offered me something I’d never seen before. “Would you like to add someone who’s missing from the photo?”
I laughed. The smart phone had finally figured out the problem. It spent a few seconds processing something. The first photograph appeared. My family on the beach. And there I was, among them. I looked more closely. The photograph had never been taken that way. I knew it. I had been holding the camera that day. I moved to the next picture. A birthday table. Now I was sitting with everyone else. In the next one, I was standing beside the Christmas tree. I have to admit, at first I liked it. My phone was putting me back into my own life.
Then I opened another photograph. The family was standing together outside a restaurant. I was among them, but I was holding a camera. I zoomed in. There was no mistake. I was standing beside my family, holding the very camera that had supposedly taken the photograph. Then, in the glass behind us, I noticed the reflection of the man taking the picture. That was me, too. One version of me was in the photograph. The other was taking it. I immediately closed the album. There are some things even technology shouldn’t try to fix.
A few days later, the family got together. At one point, someone said:
— Let’s take a picture.
Out of habit, I pulled out my phone.
— Stand over there. A little closer.
Everyone got into position.
— You, a little to the left.
I stopped. Uncle Duta would have been proud. I looked at the phone, then at them, and handed it to the person standing nearest me.
— Here, you take one.
I joined the others.
— A little closer.
I responded automatically:
— Hold the phone a little higher. Not that much. Now you’ve…
My wife looked at me.
— Do you want to take the picture?
— No.
I fell silent. Suddenly, I had no idea what to do with my hands.
— Everybody look this way.
Click.
I didn’t wonder how I’d turned out, and I didn’t ask for the phone to check the picture. If my eyes were closed, so be it. Back when I had my Smena, I used to wait days to find out how a photograph had turned out. After half a century of technological progress, surely I could manage to wait a little again.
Besides, this time I knew the one thing that mattered.
I was in it.
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