Our theme for the month of June is “snapshots.” Writers were asked to submit a piece with a cover photo that they took or created.
A couple weeks ago Jes and I returned from a 15-day trip to Italy. We’d gone with four close friends, two of whom I’ve known since at least third grade, to celebrate everyone’s big three-oh in style—or at least in such style as a grad-student salary can muster. At the risk of sounding glib, it was a lovely experience, and returning to the States, I assumed my contribution to this month’s theme would have something to do with the trip. But then I went hunting for a picture to use and realized I’d hit on an interesting snag.
Early in the trip, the six of us agreed to keep a shared photo folder. It was the sort of decision that makes such good sense it doesn’t actually require much thought. We had, we figured, six cameras among us, not to mention (thanks to some strategic packing by Mike) a drone capable of taking extraordinary aerial footage. Why not share? Pool our resources? So as we passed a bottle of wine around the kitchen table of an Airbnb and tallied expenses for the day, we fished out our phones, connected to the Wi-Fi, and started uploading files to Google.
The images trickled in. A shot of a rainy first day in Rome. Another of Sam and Ashleigh in front of the Colosseum. Several more of Vatican City, so packed we look more like cattle than like tourists. And then, too, there were photos of gelato, and photos of adventures on the Naples Metro, and photos meant to capture the unthinkable bulk of Hannah’s backpack (“three backpacks in a trench coat,” we agreed).
Sitting around the table, we flicked through our mutual uploads for a few minutes, then promised we would keep at it in the days to follow.
We proved as good as our word. In fact we were probably too good. By the time the lot of us had returned home, the group folder had amassed a staggering 1,800 photos and another 100-plus video files from the drone. Clicking through the shared folder today, I can leap from images of comically oversized limoncello spritzes at Capri to street-level shots of the Florence Duomo to group photos from the day we got lost leaving Cinque Terre to full-definition renderings of a massive foot blister Mike developed during the first days of the trip. The folder is kaleidoscopic in that way, and encyclopedic. It contains everything—delightful in its uncurated variety, chaos, and possibility.
But for that reason, it’s also a failure, assuming at least that the folder was supposed to produce a catalog we would care to browse after the fact, rather than a stuffed-to-the-rafters warehouse of digital images. Overwhelmed by its sheer volume, I sent out a text last week, floating the idea of selecting 10–15 photos each and uploading them separately. No one’s followed through on that yet, myself included. Maybe the prospect is as daunting for them as it is for me.
Whether any of us will end up using the shared folder is, I think, an open but unimportant question. The trip was never just the photos. Nor is the charmingly weird and lovingly gracious texture of the friendship I have with these people—for literal decades, in the case of Mike and Sam—reducible to its digital traces. Still, for a month themed around “snapshots,” I find it striking: we went to Italy, took zillions of pictures, and somehow produced a record of our time together that’s so prohibitively massive it works against the ostensible job of a snapshot, which is to be viewed. Which is to give pleasure. Which is to help us remember.
Writing about Amazon’s influence on contemporary literature, Mark McGurl, a literary critic, talks about the “great unread,” or “the vast number of books essentially never read by anyone.” What, he asks, do all those unread books accomplish? What are they for? I wonder whether that’ll be the fate of our group folder—the great unviewed. Maybe it will be. I hope not; there are some great pictures in there. In any event, what I do know is that the great unviewed is already the fate of the hundreds upon hundreds of other photos stored right now on my laptop and phone—photos that have nothing to do with Italy, photos taken on a whim and then never looked at again. What are they for? What do they accomplish?
Sometimes, I suppose, the world just looks better through a frame.
Sometimes the frame itself is little more than a habit.
Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.
