A PICTURE SPEAKS A THOUSAND WORDS
She Always Hated Being Photographed, and the Proof Was in an Old Photos Shoe Box
The irony, if there was one.
Me at the age of four, in the summer of 1993, in rural Romania. Bawling my eyes out for being forced to take this photograph.
The luxurious bouquet of weeds and wildflowers I clung to was thrown in my arms by an increasingly annoying and annoyed photographer, my dad.
Behind me, an old barn where grandpa kept corn and wheat to feed the animals. Mice were swarming through it, and so did sis and I.
Oh, my sister — the one in the background, at my right. She was taking a break from an exhausting photo session she terribly enjoyed. Flexing her photogenic muscles and wondering which way she looked more awesome — sunglasses on or off.
I can tell she’s been practicing many poses by the snapshots I found in mom’s old photos box.
This is one, with the teddy bear sunglasses on, an epitome of children who enjoy being photographed:
This picture was taken before mine — cue the still untainted, untangled, unwilted bouquet.
My picture ended the session because, well…
The flowers were gone. The photographer was pissed off. The diva had taken enough glorious shots. And I had bawled my eyes out for like an hour or so afterward.
Can you tell I have always hated being photographed?
I’m time-traveling, buckled up in a shoebox with old photos.
My three-year-old is humming somewhere around the room, possibly endangering himself at that very moment. Yet somehow, I’m sucked up in a whirlwind of memories, back into a fairytale land of summer holidays in the countryside.
Those were the days.
The days that felt incredibly long and were surprisingly adventurous despite the monotony rural life is notorious for.
The days when we would walk barefoot on unpaved roads all day long.
The days that smelled like wildflowers, donuts fried by grandma, alfalfa mowed by grandpa, and… cowpats. Because yes, there was a lot of dung on those unpaved, dusty countryside roads back then.
The days that would leave me lying in bed at night, with my soles black and my soul bright, with my legs stinging from the scratches I had made during the day, my heart swelling of joy, my brain carving out the very memories I summon back today.
Matthew, come over here one minute. I want to show you something. Want to see mommy when she was just a little bit older than you’re now?
Matthew approaches reluctantly. He assesses the photograph for like half a second.
I wanna see Mitzi. Where are the cat photographs?
Sure enough, we have plenty of photographs with Mitzi. That cat died when Matthew was very little, but he loves hearing stories of him and looking at his old photographs. I have more pictures with our cat Mitzi than with myself.
Can you tell I have always hated being photographed?
I won’t lie. I’d rather have a root canal than a picture taken. I guess I always had. The proof is in the photos — the few I’ve taken, the countless I haven’t.
I could talk more than a thousand words about the reasons behind my camera-shy syndrome, though that would make for a conversation with a therapist.
It probably goes way back than those pictures at the age of four.
The shy, awkward child that I see in the black and white snapshots was a mingle. Partly temperament, partly misguided parenting, partly a sense that I was not a wanted child, but rather an accepted child. All things I only came to realize much later in life.
As you’d expect, I didn’t change much over the years. I don’t have many photographs where I show up. But I have many that I’ve taken.
They say the best place to hide a dead body is on Google’s second search results page.
Can you guess the best place to hide a camera-shy person? It’s behind the camera, of course.
I hate being photographed, so I’m going to be a journalist when I grow up.
Said no journalist, ever.
Except for me, though, I’m not sure I qualify as one, despite majoring in Journalism, since I’m an online freelance writer as we speak.
Could it be for that picture where I was bawling my eyes out to have guided me where I am today?
Sure enough, it was in my grandparents’ small countryside home that I presented my first news bulletin. I recall it was a piece of news about an incident at an airport that I had made up in the spur of the moment.
That time, it was winter.
Perhaps the only winter I got to spend in the secluded village that felt like at the end of the world. The fire was burning in the stove, filling the room with the intoxicating scent of hearth bread in the making.
Even today, I can hear the wood popping under the flame wreath and see the light flickering through the old oven’s door crack.
Grandma and grandpa were outside, feeding the animals and shoveling the snow. The diva sister was reading a book of fairy tales, making me envious because I couldn’t read at the time.
And there I was, presenting the news to this sleepy, purring cat, curled up onto the cold floor after I had smuggled him into the house.
I was a real show-off when I had no spectators. Can you tell that I hated being photographed?
I used to think journalism came into my life by conjuncture. I indeed said, “Oh, snap!” when I realized that the “Communication Sciences” I had selected while signing up was actually specializing in Journalism.
In any case, journalism turned out to fit me like a glove, as long as I wasn’t the one on camera. It allowed me to shoot questions at people and paint them with more than photographs. It taught me to paint worlds from words.
But not to lose focus, I came here to say, without words in the way, that I hate being photographed.
Thank you all, for making it to the end of this memoir!
Thank you, Gaurav Jain, for this excellent prompt, A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words. If you’re curious, you can read more about it here:
Enjoy reading all the other entries on this topic here:
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