A Liar’s History
I am not a photographer, but I like taking pictures. It’s cost me a lot of money, too much for someone who treats photography simply as a hobby. My current system of choice is Nikon, although phone cameras these days are so good that I rarely need to bring it out. Still, I never regret it when I do.
My first camera was a pink pocket one that sat in the display window of a photo-printing shop near my house, a Fujifilm. Although it was only three hundred dollars, which was considered very cheap for a digital camera back then, I saved up almost a year to get it. I was fourteen. A sentimental teenager with an aversion to deleting anything. I took over five hundred photos within the month and then had to spend more money on a portable hard drive. Because I had very little money, I bought the cheapest one I could find, and it broke down within a few months. I lost everything. In less than a year, the camera broke down too. Twice. The first time, it was within the warranty period, it was salvaged. The second, it wasn’t.
Around then, the first iPhone was launched. It looked like a fat turtle but had a good camera, and whenever my friends took photos, I said, over and over again, will you email me, then spent many days stressed when they didn’t — not wanting to make myself a burden by reminding them, yet simultaneously distressed at my own inaction. When I finally got the photos, invariably, some time would have passed. I’d started a blog, which seemed to me the best way to store memories without paying for hardware that had already betrayed me once before. I would upload the pictures, type up accompanying text, chronicling how the day around that picture went, getting things wrong, but believing them, nonetheless, to be true.
The Internet was newish, and therefore dangerous. My parents confronted me, they made me delete my blog. I started another, they made me delete that one too. One day, when they realised that I wouldn’t stop, they asked me, seriously, what the point of my blog was. I wasn’t old enough to articulate myself precisely, but I know now that I was afraid, afraid of forgetting.
From ages 14 to 18, I worked a variety of odd jobs — cashier, waitress, school uniform seller, shop assistant, underaged bartender, shopping mall caroller. I blogged about some, alluding only briefly to others, spinning out yarns and yarns of unedited text. One day, a senior I had known from school reached out to me; she was working at an advertising firm, they were looking for a copywriter. She was familiar with my blog — could I come down for a quick writing test?
I spent the entirety of my first month’s paycheck on a third hand Canon DSLR, which I bought off a dodgy forum known primarily for dirty talk. The idea of meeting an anonymous Internet stranger alone terrified me, so I brought a friend along. Seven hundred dollars, paid in cash, but the actual exchange was otherwise completely unmemorable. That camera, on the other hand, formed the center of an entire relationship I had. It documented, it became a project, and when things started falling apart, talking about the camera was a way of talking around each other, the way, I suppose, some couples are with dogs, with children. Ah, I was still sentimental. I gave up the Canon in favor of a fresh start; when I turned 22, I sold everything, I moved to Nikon.
Today, I’m almost thirty. As a writer, host, and freelancer, I haven’t had colleagues in the traditional sense for over a decade, I don’t keep up with job cycles and trajectories. It surprised me, then, when a year ago, my friends started asking to look through my archive of photographs. They’re applying for new jobs, refreshing their CVs, building digital portfolios; it’s now widely understood that curating your Internet personality is a necessary part of one’s personal brand. Reviewing old photos together, it’s true, I realise: I’ve forgotten so much. I can tell that they have too, the surprise flaring on their faces as I pull up pictures, igniting hidden memories that flare in different, discomfiting ways.
Many of them want new photos, for job applications, for IDs, for dating apps. I listen to them, I understand the brief. Out comes the Nikon. Over and over again, I put my hands on my friends’ cheeks, their faces turning malleable in my palms as I adjust their facial postures, tilt their chins down, draw their eyelines towards more flattering angles, and laugh with them so their features soften, delighting as their self-consciousness melts away, always a split second before the shutter releases. I’ll email you, I tell them.
I’ll be honest. I’m not precious about fidelity. If a friend asks that I remove a pimple, I’ll do it. I’ll clean up stray hairs, rebalance lighting, skin tones. I understand that people are specific about self-presentation, the only difference being whether they admit it or not. And so, I have no doubt that even the thousands of photos I keep don’t tell the full story. I don’t expect them to.
But I don’t mind. I’ve accepted that I don’t have a good memory, already, it has failed me in so many ways. I’m not afraid of forgetting anymore. Now, whenever I want to remember the way things went, my imagination expands to fill the gaps. And if someone says, no, that’s not how it went, I shrug. I can’t verify whose story is true, theirs or mine. That we live so much in the digital sphere doesn’t bother me either, I don’t feel upset when I see the polished lives of others, I assume they’re all lying, the way I am.
I’m glad I work primarily in the realm of fiction, I don’t know how else my life could have gone. I won’t be so naive as to say that the facts don’t matter. They do. But emotional honesty, sincerity, those are facts too. Soft facts, the kind I’m drawn to, the kind that attracts me, that causes me to pull out my camera, and click.
