subject: Photographic Evidence [print this page] Photographic Evidence Photographic Evidence
I made a resolution to put together Daddy's reading list by the end of the week. Just because I was initiating my practical-to-a-fault father into the world of high literature, while desperately investigating every possible alternative career to being an English prof, didn't mean I had to lose my mind. I was giving myself the summer to get my shit together. If I hadn't figured out by August how to reinvent myself flight attendant? speech pathologist? librarian? esthetician? then I'd be condemned to the gulag of academia for another year.
Ugh. The lecture podium. The thought turned my stomach.
Daddy was trying to snap me out of my malaise by drawing on his life experience. "Remember the two years we spent in Trinidad? That was no picnic."
He was talking about the job he'd accepted in Port of Spain in the late 70s, shortly after I was born. The company had been building a steel plant there and the opportunity to live in a tropical paradise had struck my parents as a grand adventure.
The first few months were the honeymoon phase, but then reality set in. Power outages. Cultural isolation. TV programming for only one hour a day. The supermarket rarely had onions, cheese and diapers.
Daddy's point in raising Trinidad was obvious: everyone has to pay career dues. I was paying mine teaching out in the boondocks of Nova Scotia. Things would get better. Think positive.
Yeah, whatever.
I dug up an old photo album. "You didn't have it half as bad as me." I pointed at a photo of him lounging on the beach, eating a shark bake sandwich. Mommy was sunbathing in a turquoise paisley bikini.
"Oh, you have no idea what was going on behind the scenes," Daddy said. "I was losing my hair."
"No you weren't." I pointed at the photo, at his peculiar 1970s hairstyle. Long bangs brushed forward, layers falling over the ears.
"Trust me the place was a gong show."
Yet deep down I didn't believe him.
Later that day, I was surfing the New York Times online archives and I stumbled on Susan Sontag's brilliant 1974 article on photography. Each sentence hit me with a new insight, illuminating my reaction perfectly:
