Photographic Memory by Linda Murphy Marshall

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Diane Arbus

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.

Diane Arbus

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.

Ansel Adams

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.

Willem De Kooning

The world comes to a standstill in the hands of someone with a camera. The word “snapshot” encapsulates the idea of freezing a particular moment in time for all eternity. After all, that’s what the photographer is doing, capturing a moment, or an event, or a mood, or in some cases hidden feelings.

In early December of 1979, I was given a photograph taken at a party I had attended a few weeks before. I was twenty-nine at the time, and the party was held in a suburb of St. Louis to celebrate my mother’s sixtieth birthday, along with the birthdays of two men in my parents’ circle of college friends. The trio—and their spouses—had all attended Washington University, and someone—certainly not my introverted mother—had decided that three November birthdays called for a party.

It was a homespun, intergenerational affair held at one of the men’s homes (my mother wasn’t about to throw her own birthday party, although she had hosted many extended-family Thanksgiving dinners, always close to or on her late November birthday). Hors d’oeuvres were served—nothing fancy—pigs in a blanket, slices of American cheese on Ritz crackers, dip made from Lipton’s French Onion soup, the requisite 1970s fondue, and of course, birthday cake. 

Someone had an inexpensive camera, maybe an Instamatic, and must have been taking shots from a staircase because the photograph I was given was taken from above, so you see people’s faces and heads at various angles, almost like an artist’s study with different orientations. There are no full face views, but there is a smattering of three-quarter views, several profile shots, the backs of many people’s heads, and the tops of others’ heads.  A number of people are blocked by friends or family members standing between them and the path of the camera lens, or have their backs to the photographer. Also, since none of the pictures are posed, they’re action shots—at least the one I was given—with people captured talking one-on-one or in small groups. No one seems to be aware of the photographer standing above them; the two dozen or so people in the frame are all looking elsewhere.

I’m in this particular photograph, and maybe that’s why I ended up with it; someone gave it to me as a souvenir of the party after developing the roll of film. “Oh, look, here’s one from that birthday party and you can see Linda fairly well; let’s give it to her,” he might have said, idly sorting through the stack of prints and flipping them into piles as though they were a deck of cards, each pile for a designated recipient.

In the photograph I’m standing in one of the small groups, captured mid-sentence in conversation with several of my parents’ friends, who are laughing at whatever I’m saying, my hands frozen in animated gesture. It’s not a flattering shot of me: my mouth is open mid-sentence and at an odd angle, my hands are both splayed mime-style at my sides, and my eyes are open overly wide, perhaps a reflection of my enthusiasm. You can tell I’m enjoying myself, though, and I remember feeling uncharacteristically good that night. I was newly slim, having lost thirty pounds or so, and wearing a new, emerald green knit dress that hugged my body. Normally, I wore billowy granny gown-type dresses that more closely resembled nightgowns and could have comfortably fit a small trio of people inside, so this was a dramatic departure for me. And although it wouldn’t have been considered low cut by anyone else’s standards, my dress was somewhat risqué for me, showing a bit of cleavage. 

My dark brown hair was short—recently cut short as I recall—a pixie cut in the style of Dorothy Hamill, the popular figure skater of the time. All told, this was a completely new look for me: short hair, slender, and wearing a fashionable dress that showed off my new figure. It deviated from my standard frumpy look of long, straight hair (stuck in the 1960s), and shapeless clothes. 

There’s nothing especially noteworthy about the photograph. The composition is haphazard and since half the faces are partly or completely hidden, you instinctively want to flip it over, to see their faces, to see who everyone is, especially now, so many years later. The angle from above is also not ideal; a mop of hair is sometimes all you see of a person. But one thing stood out for me when I saw the picture for the first time in 1979.

The only other person in the photograph who is easily identifiable is my mother; she and I are clearly visible. The photographer, my mother, and I are triangulated so that his photograph captures most of my face, as well as most of my mother’s. 

Looking ten or twenty years younger than her actual age, this night was no exception for her. Her petite frame revealed an attractive woman in a flattering, but modest, blue shirt-waist dress. She had had her hair “done” that afternoon—she had it done every Saturday—by Mr. William at a local department store, so she was looking polished and elegant. 

Even though the photo reveals a roomful of people, she wasn’t talking with anyone, at least for the split second when the photographer snapped his picture. She was perched on the arm of a couch, focusing every ounce of her attention on one thing: me. I was standing no more than ten feet away from her, lost in my private conversation with a small group of her friends, feeling on top of the world.

It’s the expression on her face that stopped me in my tracks when I first saw the photograph, and the memory of this image has haunted me through the years. Normally, when someone was taking my mother’s picture, she had an almost regal air about her: erect posture, head held high, hands folded in lap, and legs crossed at her ankles or knees, if seated, with a slight, stiff smile on her face or, when the occasion called for it, a sense of forced cheerfulness. Her watchword—in photographs and everything else—was control. Not in this case, though, not when she was unaware of the photographer’s elevated presence and had apparently forgotten about everyone else in the room temporarily. 

My mother’s eyes are laser-locked on me like a fighter pilot tracking his target, and she is wearing an expression I can only describe as one of complete revulsion. It’s a look of pure disgust, and one I’d seen before. 

I had seen it before, but only in fleeting glimpses before she had quickly reset her expression. In almost every instance, I sensed her eyes on me, quickly turned in her direction and caught the tail end of this same chilling, almost sinister, look. But then, in a flash, the look was gone, replaced by a more benign look of mild displeasure or even apathy. For those few moments, though, it seemed like deep-seated emotions had taken possession of her. It was as though she could no longer control her feelings, and they had forced their way to the surface, to her face.

No daughter wants to think that she elicits feelings of revulsion from her mother. I can’t imagine looking at my own children with such raw contempt, and I spent the better part of my life doing everything in my power to win her over, to be worthy of her—and my father’s—love. These unmasked looks of disgust confirmed my failed efforts. And now, thanks to this photograph, I had concrete evidence of what had been there all along, what I’d feared, but tried to dismiss.

I know that this picture was an unintentional freeze-frame—a gotcha-glimpse into my mother’s heart when she thought no one was watching, a glimpse at the inexpressible but undeniable, at something daughters don’t ever want to think is true of their mothers. I know this, with the same certainty that I know that I would run into a burning building to save my own children. 

Just as X-rays reveal your bones and tissue and organs, things not visible with the naked eye but there nonetheless, this photograph showed me what I already knew was there. It made manifest what I had witnessed for decades, but didn’t want to see, had chosen not to look at, till someone unintentionally captured it forever with his camera. Even now, so many years later, it serves as a heartbreaking reminder that proof of the unvarnished truth is often found in unexpected places, in flashes just beneath the surface, and with unexpected people, like one’s own mother.