Flavoured Echoes

Well, it’s always been around me. My father was a photographer and we always had fabulous photographs for our family albums. When we were young, my sister and I were given Kodak cameras (remember disk film?), we took photos of school trips, our friends, our rooms, and each other as fashion models. In university, I got my hands on my father’s SLR (Nikkormat F-series, if memory serves) in the mid-90s but film was too frustration and I didn’t want to put the time and money into learning it properly. After that, I didn’t really have a camera to play with and any fascination with photography was forgotten.

My husband, Christopher, and I had met and fell in love in high school. As the years went by, we went from dating, to living together, to getting married. He had brought digital cameras into our home and this made photography more accessible, although it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in, besides I didn’t have anything to photograph and I considered the camera to be his. That all changed when we decided to have a baby. I knew I would want to document everything: baby toes, baby nose, baby fingers, baby ears, baby blues, first smile, first tooth, first step, first birthday. The baby would learn to associate the sound of a camera’s shutter release to his or her momma since I was going to be taking many photos and not miss a moment. I wanted to remember each precious second and marvel at all the changes of a growing child.

Sadly, things don’t always work out according to plan. After two years of trying, I wasn’t pregnant. There were indications that a baby wasn’t going to happen without medical assistance and we made the decision to stop. This isn’t an easy choice to make and it wasn’t made quickly. The details of how we came to it aren’t important, everyone’s choice is different as the circumstances and options are never the same. At this time, I also put down the camera, I had only been learning to capture the life of this child, what’s the point now?

Slowly, the grieving lessened and with gentle and persistent pushes from Christopher (and myself), I reached for the camera again. I gave myself 52 assignments for the year of 2011 and embarked on a 365 project with my trusty iPhone. Even with this keeping me busy, I am experimenting more, learning new software, understanding lighting, making wish lists for gear and being inspired by other photographers and artists. It boils down to there being things I need to show you and photography seemed the best and most interesting way to go about it.

To those in the middle of trying to conceive, my heart goes out to you. For those who need or choose to stop, I can’t promise you anything. I only know how I got through it. I sat in the middle of the pain and let it come. Wave after crashing wave, I felt each one. I kept breathing, I kept moving forward and eventually those waves subsided to little ripples. It’s part of me now. I may not have the privilege of being a mother, but I didn’t let it destroy me either.