Rachel’s Story: Part 1

Ever since I was a little girl, I have always been fascinated by mechanical devices. I loved sneaking tools out of my dad’s tool box to take apart my toys so that I could see how they worked. Unfortunately, I was never able to fix those toys nor was I ever able to put all the pieces back together. Cameras were among the first mechanical devices to catch my eye. My mom was the first amateur photographer I’d ever met and naturally, her camera was off limits. That didn’t stop me from sneaking the little black Kodak camera into my room any chance that I got. I would spend as much time as I could possibly get away with just looking over the little camera, trying to figure out how it worked. I knew right away that this was one device that I could NOT take apart.

As a kid, I was always confused and a little frustrated by how meticulous my mom would get whenever she wanted a picture of me and my siblings. It was hardly ever as simple as “say cheese!”. My mom often had coordinating outfits for us and took great care in posing us. This and her frustration whenever we would fidget or move out of place are things that I understand much better now that I have kids of my own. Life was much harder for an amateur photographer back then. It was a time when digital photography was still a ways off and there was no way to see the photo you took before it could be developed. The pressure to get it right the first time was immense and the wait for your photos was unbearable. If you wanted to see what your photos looked like, you had no choice but to pay for the entire printed roll. You couldn’t just pick the ones you liked and pay for those, and it was pretty common to end up with a bunch of blurry or out of focus shots. My mom would eagerly flip through the photos while in line at the register and I always loved watching her expressions change as she sorted through each shot. I’ll never forget her smile when she found the shots she liked.

I learned a lot about the power of photos by watching my mom. After getting a roll of film developed, she would take the prints home, lay them out on the coffee table and begin filing them away in her photo album. Then, the four of us (me, mom, my older brother, and younger sister) would sit together and flip through the many pictures. Each picture represented more than just a single moment in time. Some photos represented milestones reached while others were simple reminders of cute outfits or big smiles but my mom would always ask us what we’d been thinking at that time. Before we knew it, every photo had its own story and the album itself became a book about our family’s history. Without realizing it, my mom had taught me that photos can also tell stories, sometimes better than words can.