An Inverted Snapshot

Another artifact of my past that I never knew had been lost has been recently recovered: a photo taken at my high school graduation, I think by my father.  As with the gum diary, I don't remember this photo being taken.  But I can imagine my father taking it, as he is always trying to get his sons to pose for a photograph, which inevitably annoys them.  As a result there are a lot of photos of us (my brother and I) looking ruffled yet smiling anyway in front of a Place.  The potential events of these photos are almost entirely drowned by his act of taking them.  There is little else recorded but the fact that he recorded us at a particular time in a particular place.  But some little gem of accidence always slips out.

This photo is bursting with accidence; what he intended to photograph is so negligible that it almost seems to not be there.  There is a deadlock of gazes between the photographer and his intended subjects, but the photo's frame does not end there, revealing another interplay of gazes that point alluringly away from the photo's field of vision.

The appearance of an inside and an outside within the photo is an effect also of color.  The graduation ceremony dictated that boys wear red robes and girls wear white robes.  In the center of the photo is the large red mass of three male friends (4, 6, 7) and I (5), who were my father's subjects, smiling to the camera.  On either side of us are girls in white robes (1, 2, 3, 9, 10), and one boy (8) whose robe, despite being in the background, coheres with the uninterrupted redness of the four subjects.

All of those incidentally photographed, in the background, were acquaintances then.  One of them I know much more now than I did then.  In fact we were in a relationship only a few months after this photo was taken.  She (9) is in profile, looking off frame, directly away from us in the photo's two dimensions, but it looks as if she could be straining her neck to look sidelong at the photographer.  But perhaps she is looking at someone not pictured, far out of frame.  Behind her, her boyfriend (8) looks solemnly at the ground.  Next to her, someone many of us came to dislike even more than we did then is nearly cut out of frame, half of her head (10) looking inward at something or someone behind the red mass.  On the other side of the photo, one of her best friends (1) looks out of the photo.

What is of interest to me in this photo is what could not possibly have been of interest to me at the time of the photo.  It is a cast of characters of relationships that at the time of the photo were yet to be.

Snapshots are generally taken by pointing the camera directly at the subject, as such, the edges are neglected as pesky corners.  While this is exactly how the photographer took this photo, for the viewer it is a snapshot with an inverted gradient of interest; it is a photograph of a void surrounded by interests interested in what the photo cannot show.  Radiating outward from a visible nothing, it draws the eye to what cannot be seen.