STILL PICTURES
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STILL PICTURES
In an age of digital media, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, is a welcomed respite from content made to keep you swiping. In its pages, the late Janet Malcom (1934 - 2021)—inimitable writer and journalist at The New Yorker—goes through old black and white photos of friends and family in the early part of her life. A critic of the autobiography genre (she thought writing about oneself hazarded the desire to seem like an interesting person), this form allowed Malcolm to flirt with the genre without fully participating in it. In any case, taxonomy matters little. The result is an intimate outline of memory shaded in with speculation and perspective from the later years of her life. The closeness we feel to the narrator, to Malcom, is palpable. Is she speaking to us? It’s more like we’re listening in on a conversation she’s having with herself.
In reading these vignettes about Jewish immigrant life in post-war New York City, there is a bit of nothingness. Like the nothingness you would find if you didn’t have your phone on you, when you relaxed into this feeling of lack you would find the poignant capacity to notice. Spending time in Malcom’s quiet memories is to witness her profound excavation of what’s worth paying attention to.
In one chapter Malcom reflects on a photo of a middle-aged man and woman turned slightly toward each other and smiling: “They were close friends of my parents’ and fixtures of my childhood, a childless couple, Czech Jews, physicians, who had spent the war in London and then emigrated to New York. …They were modest, kind, good people who brought out an obnoxiousness in my sister and me for which I would blush today if I were a better person. But a child’s cruelty is never completely outgrown.”
And here’s the wisdom: “But recognizing dullness for the dispiriting thing it is may not be a bad part of one’s early education. It can only make the glamorous, the hilarious, the sexy, the strange more precious.”
In reading her memories, you’ll find the quotidian and yes, even the boring. But that’s what makes up a life, isn’t it?
“As I prepare to tell the story of Ella’s later life, I am struck by the characteristic disparity between the dramatic character of the stories we hear and tell about people we know and the prosaic character of the people themselves. In literature interesting things happen to interesting people; in life, more often than not, interesting things happen to uninteresting people.”
Yet many of us never take the time to extract the meaning from the mundane. It’s ok to be uninteresting, so long as you yourself remain perpetually interested in life.
Written by So Textual
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