I am incredibly sentimental, like many people my age.
I have boxes filled with birthday cards from the last 22 years, a memory box from my last relationship collecting dust in the back of my closet, and dried petals from the bouquet of white roses my boyfriend gave me for our anniversary sitting on my bedside table. It fascinates me how much our minds can hold. It still surprises me that a scent can transport you back to a place you left behind years ago, or how looking down the subway and noticing the person next to you wearing New Balance sneakers can bring you back to your old university apartment because they are the same ones your roommate used to squeeze into before running out the door.
My heart aches when I think about my past, though I’m unsure why.
Is it because I miss that time in my life? Or because I miss the person I was? Perhaps it’s the relentless passage of time. Some days, nostalgia rests so heavily on my chest, and the weight is unbearable. I can't bring myself to look through old photos, knowing they hold moments I’d give anything to relive.
Still, I love taking pictures. I get that from my mother. She always had a camera in hand, and from a young age, I was drawn to the idea of capturing life's moments from my perspective. I got my first DSLR in high school, and by university, I was experimenting with film photography, which I quickly fell in love with. I adore the graininess of film photos; it adds a layer of nostalgia, a tangible connection to the past. When I look at pictures of my friends and me taken on film, I often think, "This will be one of the photos I show my kids—proof that I lived." Photography captures proof of our existence. But why this incessant need to prove we were here, that we lived? My camera roll is filled with milestone moments, sure, but it’s also crammed with the mundane—flowers from the grocery store, my Tuesday breakfast, my Wednesday outfit, and pictures of the moon.
But why?
With cameras so easily accessible, it's effortless to document everything—videos of friends, family, daily errands, getting ready, and life in general. There’s been a lot of discourse lately on social media about why we feel the need to capture everything we do. Is part of it rooted in fear? Fear that a seemingly insignificant moment today might become a memory of great importance later? When you have technology that allows you to freeze a moment forever, there’s an undeniable pull to use it, to secure it, so our past can be brought into the present, over and over again. Or maybe we capture these moments because we fear forgetting who we were, not realizing that all the past versions of ourselves still live inside us, no matter how much time passes.
These thoughts have been swirling in my mind for a while. In my final year of undergrad, I had the pleasure of diving into Susan Sontag's work for my spectral cinema class. In her book “On Photography”, Sontag explores the relationship between photography and death, and I couldn’t help but wonder how this idea applies in today’s world, where we can capture any moment we choose. With the ease of photography, we can look back at our past selves whenever we like, revisiting the so-called "good old days." But were they really better? Or do we just remember them as simpler times? I look back at pictures from last summer, surrounded by friends, always exploring the city. I look so happy and confident. But what the pictures don’t show is the girl who spent countless nights sobbing over her year-long relationship, wondering if he was thinking about her too.
In my opinion, Sontag explains it best: through images of ourselves and those we love, we encounter a version of ourselves we've left behind. She writes, “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time” (Sontag, 1979).
There’s a kind of death that occurs when a photo or video is taken—the death of a fleeting moment, along with all the people in it. We can never get that moment back; we can only observe it as an outsider, frozen in time. Photography communicates death, the impermanence of time—a death of the moment, of identity, or of a person entirely.
As the years pass and life unfolds, I find it increasingly difficult to look back at photos of my younger self. I often wonder if this is where she imagined she'd end up, if this is the life she thought was waiting for her. Sure, the five-year-old me didn’t have much say in things, but I still see her in those photos, quietly asking if I’m living up to the dreams she didn’t yet know how to name. And maybe, just maybe, this nostalgia I carry is nothing more than a soft kind of grief, repackaged for the sentimental.