Our gallery of partial truths
A journey in careful editing
We’ve lived in our house for nearly five years now, which means it’s finally time to tackle that big home improvement project we’ve been talking about.
No, no, not adding the extra bathroom.
No, not redoing the cracked tile in the other bathroom.
No, not repairing the spalling concrete on the patio, or the finally figuring out the weird plumbing issue in the laundry room, or dealing with the finicky fluorescent lights in the storage room, or—hey, you know what? We’ve been busy, okay?
Lay off. There’s been a whole pandemic.
We’re going to hang some pictures up. Okay? Can’t that be enough for you?
It’s always been part of our plan for this house to do a gallery wall. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about: we pick a large, blank swath of wall, and cover it with an artfully-arranged assortment of framed family photos. We read somewhere a while back that it’s important for children to see pictures of themselves on the walls of their home, because it makes them feel empowered. I already think the children are dangerously empowered, of course, but if a child psychologist says something’s good for them, we’ll do it. (Unless it’s limiting screen time.) (Screen time is me time.)
Of course, despite the fact that bringing said gallery wall to fruition would only take at most a long afternoon of work, we’ve dragged our feet on it for years. In a brief fit of enthusiasm, I bought all the frames over a year ago, but since then they’ve sat propped in a corner, forlornly collecting dust and awaiting their moment in the sun, unsure if it would ever come.
The excuses finally ran out, though. My wife and I vowed that we would get it done before the holidays, and the holidays are fast approaching, so we settled in for the most important part of the work: digging back through old photos, trying to select the twelve images that would perfectly represent our small family.
This is not a task to be taken lightly, of course.
Not only is the children’s already-excessive self-esteem at stake, but… this is a gallery wall. This is a way of showing off to any houseguest or visitor just how perfect we are, how beautiful and well-behaved-for-photos our children are, how much we have our shit together as people who not only buy matching frames but put photos in them and hang them on the wall. It’s like Instagram, but people you actually know are going to see it. It’s a big deal.
We started with the obvious stuff, of course: annual school photos, pictures from the backyard shoot a photographer friend did last fall, group shots from a family wedding several years ago. This is a good base, but it’s too formal. You can’t make a gallery wall too formal, or it ends up looking like a shrine. Besides, we’re not looking to project too polished a charm here. We want to exude natural charm; candid, spontaneous. It has to look like we just rolled out of bed and had a perfect family who smiles and looks directly at the camera all at the same time.
Thankfully, I’m the kind of parent who takes a ton of photos, so I started scrolling through the tens of thousands of images I have archived in Google Photos. There’s some great stuff in there!
There’s the kids sitting by the edge of a small lake, relaxing after a hike we took in Jefferson Memorial Forest last fall.
There’s the kids, still clad in their swimsuits and wet from a run through the sprinkler, happily sharing a freshly-picked bell pepper in a moment that makes every penny I spent on planting a garden seem worth it.
Our daughter wearing her panda Halloween costume on a day that was definitely not Halloween.
Our son, leaping off a rock at the park, frozen in mid-air as if suspended by a spring.
The kids happily playing in a warm tide pool on the beach one beautiful day in early summer; them dragging their sleds down our unplowed street on a frigid day a few months prior.
The images are at once familiar and surprising, a reverse-chronological journey through times that I’ve remembered and times that I’ve forgotten—along with some that I wished I’d remembered and others I wish I’d forgotten. Scrolling through them offers a stark reminder of just how long the days can be and how short the years are.
I scroll further back.
There’s a picture of a cardboard box that a birthday gift had come in, a box that my son drew a face on, declared was “his box friend”, and insisted eat with us at the dinner table several nights in a row during the lonely summer of 2020.
(We let it ride until recycling day.)
A picture of my then-five-year-old son on one of the daily strolls we’d take around the neighborhood each evening at 5pm that spring, our only signifier that the work day was over and our only chance to see our neighbors, who were out taking the same stroll. His eyes are dark, his hair mussed, his shoulders slumped. He’s carrying a beer can; I’d presumably asked him to hold it while I hoisted his little sister on my shoulders—she always complained about her legs being tired when we’d barely made it three houses down our street, and still does sometimes—and I thought it was a funny picture to capture at the time.
It’s not funny, looking back; I see how broken his spirit was that month.
There’s the novel-at-the-time picture of the kids huddled in front of a laptop, taking their first-ever video call with friends that they hadn’t seen in a week and might not see again for several weeks. Maybe even a month, we thought.
The trip we took to the ice skating rink, February 29th, 2020; our last normal day for a long time. He’s smiling in this photo; that’s a lie. He hated ice skating, and moaned the entire time. (She was a natural.)
After hours of scrolling, we’d selected a dozen images and sent them off to be printed, a carefully-curated portrait of family life. There’s one of them as babies—god, they were so close together, what were we thinking?—and one from just a few months ago. There’s pictures of extended family, pictures of us, a picture of the dog. It’s a nice balance and lovely composition, some formal, some casual, all happy, all real, and yet it’s miles away from the whole truth.
It looks perfect, and that’s a lie. No family is perfect; no family has only happy times. Children don’t always smile for the camera, and adults don’t always look the way they want to. Sunny days aren’t always taken advantage of, and rainbows don’t appear after every rainy day. I wouldn’t delete a single image from that library, though, because they represent times we spent together. Things we went through together. In that sense, they are perfect.
The pictures aren’t always pretty, but they don’t have to be.
We just don’t put them all on the wall.
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
When the kids were very small, we took them to a professional portrait studio for some photos. They were wearing the sort of "good clothes" that grandparents buy with joy but your kids wear twice because, really, how the fuck do you iron something with sleeves that are only three inches long? We plopped DC#2 down on the photo backdrop and tried all sorts of tricks to get him to sit still while the photographer started taking film (yes, film). Then he rolled over and started crawling straight toward the camera with a huge grin on her face. She kept shooting.
That was the best one of the bunch, and the one that's still in the 8x11 frame we'll haul out to embarrass him when he brings his girlfriend home to meet the parents next month. "Perfect photos" aren't perfect poses; they're the ones that capture the best small moments of joy in your life. Everyone should have a wall of those, if only in our minds.
squidward-ass-looking photo wall picture