Are the baby photos getting boring? This is the end of them, I promise … until grandchildren, anyway. But here I did not select a portrait of our new son Nick on his own, but in the arms of his older brother Tim, then five. It presages a future in which two brothers become great mates. For a time, as adults, Tim and Nick would eventually share a house, work as a team building flatpack kitchens, recreate together through slacklining, and mix with overlapping circles of friends. The photo shows good mates in the making, caught at the very beginning.
I suppose I impose this meaning on the photo with the benefit of hindsight. The photo is given its significance by the life stories that played out after the event. Had my sons grown up to be cold, estranged or even antagonistic to each other, which can happen despite parents’ best intentions, the photo would look like a forlorn picture of what might have been. Perhaps, in those circumstances, I would not select it for this blog, despite its qualities as a photo. If the image were a hurtful reminder of a family flaw, the photographer parent might prefer to leave it undisclosed in the slide collection.
This is a little pre-emption of the dilemmas of social media. If you share the negative along with the positive, you risk becoming even more open than usual to hurtful trolling. If you publish only the good, you risk creating an online image that is a false representation of your real, lived experience.
In the same manner, of course, I have left out almost all of the below average and terrible photos, and there are many of those in my collection. I select the better photos because they are – hopefully – worth looking at and talking about.
Beauty is its own justification, but so is honesty, so all of these photos of family life should be viewed with a disclaimer that life was not always as it appears in the images. Every photo is of a real moment, but these delightful, beautiful real moments existed in an everyday family that also had very real rough patches.
The smooth patch captured above, taken later in the year, depicts our young family as my wife and I like to remember it – four happy kids showing their togetherness. Raising himself up on his hands was Nick’s only trick at that point (he can throw handstands now, and walk a slackline), so they all followed suit for the camera. Usually I don’t set up poses, but this one worked.