Missing Time: Photography as a Barometer of Where my Life Has Been

I was looking for some old gardening photos today and the search made me suddenly realize the degree to which old photos — and the periodic lack of old photos — have been a remarkably accurate "barometer" of how my life was going, at any given time.

Lots of photos, documenting lots of different stuff? Life must have been going OK.

Almost no photos at all, least of all with people in them? Pretty good indication my life was going to shit.

Maybe this isn't a particularly earth-shattering insight, and maybe it holds true for everyone; I just know how true it has been, in my life.

This all started because I wanted to write a retrospective gardening post, and wanted to see if I could find some photos of the raised beds I built when I was still living in Central Texas. But there are virtually NO photographs from that particular time period. Of any kind, let alone of my garden beds.

And there's no excuse here that "it was before digital cameras." It was not; this was around 2002 or so.

Anyway, I grew more curious and started looking at the blank areas in the photographic journey of my life. Although I have always enjoyed photography, and it felt like I was "always taking pictures of stuff," it wasn't really until I moved to Washington state in 2006 that my photostream started to become consistent and more or less unbroken.

Prior to that, there were a number of glaring gaps, some of them several years long. In each case, I was definitely going through something, and had very little inclination to "document my life," or even to photograph anything purely because it was attractive or interesting.

I just have relatively little interest in anything around me during those times when I feel overwhelmed by life. Which is also why any retrospective "memoir" style essays I every write are seldom illustrated with photos from the time I am describing.

Regardless, I scrapped the whole idea of writing a post about past gardening exploits in a completely different climate from the one I am working with now... because I really wanted to show those 40-foot long beds, built to be almost terraced on a substantially sloping piece of land. They were a lot of work, and I grew some really excellent peppers, and they also represented my first experience with "lasagna gardening."

But so much for that. Noteworthy, though, that even though I thoroughly enjoyed that particular gardening experience... it happened during one of my lows, so it never really occurred to me to photograph anything.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!

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Created at 2023-04-08 00:18 PST
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