Last week I returned from a three-week trip to northern Italy with my mom and my brother, Zak. What inspired the trip? One answer is that my mom is 78 years old. She may have a heart valve replaced soon. While she’s still mobile and present, she wants to live life fully. Another one is that the three of us love to eat and drink and, specifically, we love to eat and drink together. My mom and Zak have traveled to Italy together several times. They wanted to share some of the pleasures they’ve known with me. My friend Nancy calls this the anti-schadenfreude: pleasure derived by sharing things you love with others and witnessing their pleasure.
Of the three of us, Zak, my older brother, takes photos with the most care. This weekend, he sent us both a folder of his images, and I was amused to find a dozen of my mom and me in the midst of eating and drinking. Of course that’s what we spent much of our time doing—my mom began to beg us to start dinner by 8 knowing it would take us three-plus hours to eat and she wanted to be in bed before midnight. Yet somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that there would be this log of candid photos—of fingers in mouthes, lips against the thin lip of a wine glass, mouthes scrunched mid-sentence, mouthes scrunched mid-bite.
Photos are lies, of course. They are lies in the way that only telling part of a story can be an intentional omission and create a lie. They have the power to fuck with memory, to replace the complex whirl of feelings with a static image that shows only what was visible. But these photos—these awkward candid ones through the eyes of my brother—feel like a kind of truth, which is that we are seen most by the people who love us. We are literally looked at by them—our faces, our gestures, our expressions, the weird way we clutch peanuts in our grimy fingers, the way our mouthes hang open and drool while we sleep. We don’t know our faces the way they do. We don’t know our movements the way they do. And sometimes, a photo can show us ourselves through someone else’s viewfinder, through someone else’s whirl of emotions.
All of Zak’s photos are great so I’m going to share another set soon! Next time, not of us eating and drinking. I think this was probably a tall enough pour of those!
If you want to see some of Zak’s breathtakingly gorgeous, often disturbing, and always stirring animations, check out zakmargolis.com.
Your momma is an astonishing human. Love these candid photos. A good reminder to take pictures that are not idealized versions of our selves.
That was wonderful! Thank you for bringing me along.