Baby photos

Helena Iara is the first kids on my side of the family to grow up in the age of digital photography, when the only real cost of photos is the up-front capital investment (the camera), so different from my own parents who worried about the cost of film and developing.  As a result, we have hundreds of wonderful photos of Helena in her first two and a half months of life.  My parents have just a couple: Rita's parents took no photos of her at all until she was more than a year old.

One doesn't have to be Amish or a member of a tribe that thinks that photographs steal the soul to wonder what the impact of all of these photos will be on a baby's subjectivity later in life.  As I was thinking about this (and after Rita and I took some great photos of Helena a couple of mornings ago), I decided to talk to Helena about Walter Benjamin.

The premise of Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility" is pretty simple: he talks of the sacred work of art in medieval Europe, like the statues of saints kept hidden away in churches, to be circulated only once a year in parades on the saint's day.  These works of art, Benjamin suggested, had an "aura" about them, something of the work of art that was more than the work itself.  We have something of a sense of the power of this aura when we walk into the Louvre and try to get to see the Mona Lisa, only to find access impossible because of the hordes of people who just want to get close to the painting.  Truth is, a good quality reproduction will give you a better idea of the Mona Lisa than fifteen minutes of pushing and shoving to get within twenty feet of it, but when we go to Paris, we still have to go through the ritual of going into that room.

Compare the aura of the Mona Lisa, then, to a great movie or photo.  Is there one copy of Casablanca or Le Meprise which has that kind of aura?  Of course not: each one is just like any other copy.  We might remember our experience of the movie (I saw it in that old theater on Main Street...), but that is a different kind of aura.  Benjamin says that one of the major characteristics of art in the 20th Century was this reproducibility and the loss of aura; to a certain degree he lamented this loss (and most of his interpreters have focussed on this part of his analysis), but he also said that the political consequences would be more positive: when there is no aura, it steals the authority of priests and kings over art and over the ideology that comes with it.

As I explained all of this to Helena (she paid much more attention than you might have expected), I thought about baby pictures.  Rita's grainy baby pictures have definite aura: there are only one or two, so we pay attention to each one, looking for clues to the future her.  There are more pictures of me as a baby, but several of them share something similar: I particularly remember one photo of me with a hose, getting ready to pour water all over the house.

Personal history is almost infinite: so many things happen to us that we can't "remember" them all... or more accurately, few of them are in active memory.  I see that photo of me with the hose as an image that points to me today, while many other images have just slipped out.  And Rita's few baby pictures have to seem like the seeds of her determination and intellect.  But what happens when there are literally thousands of photos of a baby?  How will she select the ones that she considers important, the ones that will point to what she will become?

As this happens, I think that photography becomes more and more like memory.  What matters isn't so much what is there, but how we edit and select it.  But perhaps I'll need another long talk with Helena to figure that one out.