000028 — She keeps taking the camera

I’m just now looking through and editing photos from nearly a year ago, when Olivia and I went to Toronto, and I’m remembering how much of that trip I spent asking her if I could borrow the camera.

It was technically my camera, yet she carried it as if it belonged to her. We were there for Morgan Wallen, but we had a few days to explore the city, and everywhere we went she was looking. She would stop, move a little to the left or right, set up the shot, think about the composition, take the photo, look down at the screen, and decide whether she had what she wanted. I watched her develop an eye in real time. And what I love about it now, more than anything, is realizing that all these years, while she has been telling me she hates how many photos I take, she has also been paying attention. Clearly, she loves it.

Every now and then, when something caught my eye, I would say, hey, can I get the camera for a second? I would take a few shots and hand it back.

I expected concert lights, subway platforms, city streets, and many, many photos of “Drake’s CN Tower,” her words, not mine, ha. Then I found a picture of me standing in front of a wall of photography books, glancing at something that had caught my attention. I am not even looking at the camera. I had zero idea what was happening behind me.

I am usually the person behind the camera. I like being there because I can participate in the moment and still keep a little distance from it. I can watch. I can decide what belongs in the frame, what gets cropped, the exposure, when I have enough. I can make a record of everyone I love and quietly leave myself out of it, which I have done for years without thinking much about why.

Being behind the camera also means I don’t have to wonder how I am being seen.

I have spent a lot of my life managing that question. I learned early to explain myself, offer context, anticipate what someone might misunderstand, and try to get there before anyone else could. That instinct has been useful. It has helped me lead through difficult rooms and tell the truth when the wrong interpretation could carry a real cost. It has also made me very comfortable shaping how I am understood.

I do some version of this in writing too. Even when I am telling the truth, I still decide where the story begins, which details belong, and how much context the reader receives. I can return to an old journal entry and help the younger version of me make more sense of a moment, season, or thought than he could while he was living it. I believe in that work. I also know I am usually the one curating the record, the memory.

I don’t know what Olivia saw when she lifted the camera in Toronto. Maybe the light was good. Maybe she was practicing or bored, or simply documenting the trip the same way she has watched me do for most of her life. I could ask her, and I probably will, but I’m enjoying not knowing yet. It gives me a chance to receive the picture before turning it into an explanation, which I am clearly struggling to do because I am writing an entire Field Note about it. You can chuckle at that.

Toronto was not the last time she took the camera.

On every trip since, she has wanted it more. At first she would ask to use mine. Then she started carrying it for long stretches without asking. On this trip to New York City and upstate New York, she brought one of my older cameras with her. She packed it the night before we left and has carried it as her camera throughout the trip. Every so often I look over and see her raising it toward something she noticed, moving around until the composition feels right to her, making a picture I would not have made because I was looking somewhere else.

She has watched me photograph our family for most of her life. First days. Birthdays. School projects. Games. Trips. Random meals. The moment everyone happened to be laughing at once. I have thousands of pictures of Olivia and Noah because some part of me has always wanted them to know I was paying attention. I wanted them to have evidence of their lives, of our life, and of how loved they were while they were still too young to understand what it meant to be loved that closely.

I had not spent much time considering that they were making a record of me.

Olivia has her own eye now. She notices different things. She has her own memory of our family and her own version of who I am. That version is being formed in ordinary moments, in the tone I use in the car, in whether I listen all the way through, in the times I am distracted, in the times I show up, and apparently in the moments when I am standing in front of a shelf of books with no idea she is looking.

I can shape the environment around my children. I can teach them, apologize when I get something wrong, talk to them about what we believe, and try to live those beliefs in front of them. I cannot select the father they remember. That version of me is already forming through thousands of moments I will never have the chance to edit.

There was a lot happening in my life during that trip. I was nearing the end of a demanding and complex professional interval, navigating conversations that would impact thousands. Olivia could not have known everything moving through my mind when she took those pictures. None of it is visible anyway. In the photographs, I am walking down a street, standing in front of some books, and spending a few days in Toronto with my daughter.

I am simply there with her.