52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 18-Tradition
Prompt: Traditions can be an important part of family history, bringing context and connection between generations. What is an important tradition in your family, and who worked to keep that tradition going?
There is a tradition in our family, as in many others’, of documenting family history through photography. This role often falls to one person in each generation. My maternal grandfather was an avid photographer and even took some primitive videos of vacations he took with my grandmother. My father was “the photographer” in my nuclear family. And I have assumed the role in my own family.
The birth of our only child coincided with the birth of the very first consumer digital cameras. An early adopter of all electronics, my husband bought one for me prior to our daughter’s birth. He brought it to the hospital and photographed the first hours of our daughter’s life. I am still a patient of the same obstetrician who delivered our daughter. When my doctor inquires about my daughter, she often remembers aloud that it was at my daughter’s delivery that she saw her very first digital camera.
The Kodak DC20, my first digital camera, was a fixed-focus camera that captured images in 320 x 240 pixels or a higher resolution(!) of 493 x 373 pixels. It contained one megabyte of internal storage which could store 16 standard or 8 high resolution photos. It had to be connected to a computer to download the images.
My first digital camera was typical of entry-level consumer digital cameras. It boasted sub-0.2 megapixels. Low light or shadows often resulted in color distortion. The results were very grainy, low-resolution photos, but the ability to immediately see and print them and to send them as attachments to email were complete game-changers. We were able to share photos of our newborn with friends and family all over the country the same day she was born. At the time this was revolutionary.
These early iterations of digital photography can be seen as more of a novelty. They certainly did not take the place of SLR cameras for quality images. Unless I wanted to share an image immediately, for the first five years or so of my daughter’s life, I shot film with a Nikon SLR. My color shots were developed at a lab, but I also did quite a bit of black/white photography, developing those prints myself in a darkroom.
With the advent of cellphones with built-in cameras, this all changed. Now, not only is practically everyone a photographer, but there is rarely an occasion at which someone does not have a phone on them to record the moment.
I write all of this for several reasons:
- A descendant reading this in the future—or even younger generations today—might not be able to comprehend the limitations of photography prior to, say, the 2000s, due to cellphones with cameras being ubiquitous today. Those limitations were due largely to the film format which meant:
- Having the film developed. This involved dropping canisters off at a lab, and picking them up later.
- Not knowing whether one “got the shot” or not. There was no way to know until the film was developed whether one had gotten a suitably composed, properly exposed shot, whether the shutter speed had sufficiently captured any movement without blur, or whether people had their eyes closed at the time the shutter was released.
- Sharing photos with others meant either
- Ordering “double prints” when the film was dropped off at the lab (but that meant you got—and were paying for—two prints of EVERY photo. Even the crappy ones.) OR
- Going through the prints, selecting those images for which duplicates were desired, finding the corresponding number on the accompany negatives, and returning to the lab with the negatives to place another order for duplicate copies of the select images.
- Mailing the prints. Either way, once the prints were picked up, one had to put them in an envelope and send them via snail mail to recipients, often taking days.
When my daughter was a few years old, the consumer digital camera market was exploding with relatively affordable digital SLR’s that put the first point-and-shoot digital cameras to shame. Eventually, I got my first Nikon DSLR. Between that purchase and taking some photography classes, my results improved immeasurably.
Besides continuing the family tradition of taking and archiving family photographs and adapting to the explosion in advances in digital photography, I also started documenting the beginning of each school year in a way that has been meaningful for our family. Snapping a photo of one’s child, dressed and ready to go out the door for the first day of school, is a traditional way to mark each school year. I just took this practice and reimagined it.
I have an entire folder of photos from the first day of every school year of my daughter’s life, taken from the back, in which she is walking hand in hand with her father.
The inspiration for this was the above photo—an image I took of the two of them in a local park. Of all of the countless photos I’ve taken of my husband and daughter, this one has always been his absolute favorite. We both love how you can tell that she is still getting used to walking and is a bit unsteady, even looking down at her feet. She has to reach up, almost above her head, to take my husband’s hand. His right shoulder is bent down so that he can grasp her small hand to ensure she doesn’t fall.
I like to tell him that he’s been my daughter’s rock since day one. In this photo, I see the certainty of his steadfast presence, the security his touch provides, and the never-ending support that he has always given her. To this day, she turns to him for reassurance, wisdom, and guidance.
This tradition—taking photos from behind of the two of them walking together on the first day of school every September, year after year—provides a unique perspective. It’s fascinating to compare her height relative to my husband’s, the relative loosening of the grip of their hands, the length of her hair, and even the various backpacks she had over the years.
These photos represent much more than each person’s physical attributes, though. Like the photo of my daughter clinging to my husband while gingerly walking in the park, this photographic “theme and variations” is symbolic of my husband’s unwavering support for our daughter, manifested in so many ways over many years.
Through Pre-K, kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school, college, and well beyond that, he has always been there, holding her hand.
