All You Need
What's in a photograph...?
A few weekends ago, I went with some of my coven to a tiny village on the south-west Swedish coast to spend the night and a day at a summer house. We’re friends in that way you get a bit hazy on who met who, when or how, we just know it’s been years now. All of us have kids, jobs, partners and responsibilities, but for thirty glorious hours we paid no heed to any of it. We ate and read and chatted and walked and slept and swam, and we did it all when we wanted without fuss or preparation or negotiation. I cannot recommend this enough.
The summer house in question is a red wooden clapboard thing of utter Scandinavian charm, built during the 1930s in the middle of a now-protected nature reserve by my friend’s Great-great Aunt. It is full of such honest-to-goodness cottagecore that we spent the first twenty minutes after we arrived pawing at vintage wallpaper and floral bathing jugs. For decades, the house has been loved and lived in by consecutive generations, including a slightly mind-bending time when it was leased during WWII to someone relatively famous who then got Arne Jacobsen to build one just like it an acorn’s throw away. My friend has spent all her summers in this house, just as her elders did, and she loves the place so much that she named her first-born son after it.
On the drive there, we talked about the holidays of our childhood and how the ones that most evoke that sweetening of nostalgia are the places we revisited time and again. For as long as I can remember, my parents took me and my sister camping in Normandy for two weeks every summer, an experience akin to an SAS endurance test of our spirits and resilience that was only redeemed once we did the annual booze-chocolate-cheese sweep at the hypermarché nearest the ferry terminal before we left. We usually had a good time, if the sun showed up, but I wasn’t tempted to name my daughter after the campsite we stayed at the most.
I keep returning to this idea of memory as feeling, and the feeling being home. This is most closely what nostalgia resembles; it’s joy in the memories but it’s sadness, too. For my friend, this little red house is evidently a place where she feels deeply at home because of all the memories she’s accumulated there. I can only imagine how much of a balm that must have been during times in her life when she moved between countries and rentals, or when hard things happened, operating like an emotional backstop. There is joy, clearly, but I know there is sadness too.
In the evening, as we finished off the wine, she showed us an old black and white photo of her young and dashing father unloading the truck of a car outside the summer house many decades ago. We marvelled at the kinds of lives our parents must have lived before we were born, and how very much like our friend this handsome chap looked. It was in his smile, and the radiating happiness of being in a place that felt like home.
Every time I turned around, I was smacked in the face by the beauty of everything around me, especially in that golden light of the setting sun whilst we meandered down to the harbour after dinner. At first, I couldn’t stop pulling out my phone to take photos because everything felt sublime and ridiculous. Look at that porch! Have you seen the wisteria?? I LOVE A THATCHED ROOF! But soon it felt redundant—no photo could show the whole, and how do you faithfully capture what it feels like to have a meaningful conversation about love and loss without being interrupted every 37 seconds by a two-year-old asking for snacks? As one of us later remarked, “I thought I’d taken loads of photos, but it’s just close-ups of wallpaper and the backs of your heads.”
Do we need loads of photographs to remember these moments? Does taking them make the memory clearer, or is it enough to have simply been there and go back in our minds? No doubt there was something profoundly special about looking at that single black and white photo of my friend’s father, but how often will I look at the reams of shots I took of the slightly different angles of the table set for dinner? What’s the likelihood my kids will print any of them out and show their friends? Will anything change in how I feel about that trip and my happy memories of it if I just… delete them?
Some of this thinking was prompted by what I can only describe as a deeply depressing post I saw on LinkedIn earlier this week. The writer was explaining that their 10-week old baby laughed for the first time and they ‘hadn’t managed to capture it’. The twist was that they subsequently realised their Ring camera might have caught it, but because they hadn’t subscribed or fully registered the device, the footage wasn’t archived. The post was a plea to help them get Amazon HQ to track down the footage and share it with them.
Look, this is straddling into some icky Black Mirror territory if you ask me. There were so many layers to this post that floored and saddened me, but the kicker was that these frantic parents—insane in the way only those who’ve slept for a total of ten hours over ten weeks will know—seem to have come to the harrowing conclusion that if it wasn’t captured on camera, it’s lost all its value.
I know the kind interpretation is that they simply want to be able to revisit their baby’s first laugh as often as they please, but this is not how life works. This is not, actually, how memories are made. But we’ve become frighteningly accustomed to witnessing all kinds of mundane and magical moments in people’s lives on social media, nearly all of which are contrived, that we feel entitled to the same kind of documentary footage of our own. Just keep the camera rolling, kids, and when the day is done we can watch it all again at twice the speed! Worse, PAY A SUBSCRIPTION to a major corporation who will only give you your memories back if you give them money. What kind of distorted hellscape are we living in?
The thing about your baby’s first giggle is that your brain basically explodes with oxytocin and you cannot imagine loving anyone or anything more, and there’s not a camera in the world that can capture that. So it goes that a photo of an alfresco dinner with my friends cannot contain the moment I fully exhaled for the first time in months and felt my heart break open with love to hear these incredible women talk about their tender lives.
The funny thing is that as I was writing this piece, a different friend sent over a photograph from the weekend at her own summerhouse in Denmark (I know, everyone here owns a summer house; that’s a whole other piece, we’ll put a pin in it for now). In the picture, she had just emerged from the sea as naked as the day she was born, arms flung out, nipples to the wind, and head back in some kind of ululation of joy. It’s an incredible photo, and if someone had taken one like that of me I’d almost certainly print and frame it for all to see. But I also know that my friend doesn’t need the photo to remember that moment—one she described as ‘FREEDOM!’ in her message. Every time she goes back to that house, she bakes in another memory, whether it’s naked sea-swimming or a slow breakfast around the table with her kids. The memory is the feeling, and the feeling is home.
But I do also like the idea that sometime down the line, when her children are grown and they take their friends to the same house—the one they spent all their summers at—they’ll whip out this remarkable old photo of their young and dashing mother and everyone will comment on how alike they look. They’ll say that it’s in her smile, and the radiating happiness of being in a place that felt like home.
Glorious piece. M x