Bad Photos

If the year is 2226, and technological imagination has realised itself, and my clone in cryosleep is waiting, eyes closed, for a project of my selfhood to populate her soul, what would it contain?

The nurse asks me now: what is your self to you, from your birth to today? Can you feel the lineage of your physical being in space? You don’t look at all like you did as a baby and most of the cells you were born with have been replaced. Can you package your identity in your head to project out into the world? 

In the slippery confines of the mind, memory is a house of mirrors. I think of my youth, and I think of old photos. Salvaged PNGs from the busted iPhoto app on our family’s ancient Macbook Pro Unibody, a few of which survive on my current laptop. 

Most of these photos are objectively terrible. There will be ten photos of the same hotel room with only three in focus. Anything moving will be a blur. A whole scene will be underexposed and oversaturated. An unnamed hotel room, obscured faces, my young parents, our old couch without stains yet, ten selfies of my cousin’s babyface, amusement parks I would never go to now.

Each one comprises a cache of clues to the past. Start with the basics. Who is pressing the shutter? Where is that place? Why has the photo survived all these years, despite being easily deletable? Taken when it was still possible to take bad photos, before automated focus or excessive curation, patience is required to learn the visual language of the past, to decode its grammar and use it to understand the present. 

The irony of missing my childhood rests on my inability to recall much. An absence of artefacts from this time contributes to a sweet amnesia, lending to my romanticisation of a time that must have been quite tough on my mother. 

I’m guessing my mum was the one who took most of the photos. Her lens drifts over things that might be important to remember: how fancy the hotel room looked on a trip to Hong Kong, a New Year’s couplet, a gathering of family friends, all a blur now save for the photos. Many are of me. 

I see that even though my parents tell me I didn’t cry much as a child, I was a menace and a tomboy, eyes wide eyebrows raised mouth wide open fingers outstretched like claws. I was very affectionate with my family, cuddling up to them all the time. There was a fervour and hunger in my eyes that has diminished when I look into the mirror today.

I think I’d give my clone self these photos. I'd tell her: this is what it looked like to not yet know what was worth keeping. A syntax is created out of whatever the photographer could not bring herself to delete, without knowing why, waiting for someone to come looking.

She'd have to learn to read it herself. So did I.