Last Shots

My dad was always an avid photographer. He had constructed a darkroom in his basement and enjoyed shooting and developing his own photographs. His favourite camera was his old trusty Leica, and his forays into digital brought him recently to the Nikon D40x. Digital promised faster results with pretty good optics, and a digital SLR ensured he could still frame the image in the viewfinder.

I usually inherited his old cameras. I spent millions of hours with his old Ricoh and learned much of what I now know about photography from it. He bought the Nikon not more than a couple of years ago, although his interest in photography had shifted in his older age. He seemed to have the same passion for it, but not the same physical interest. This resulted in his not using the Nikon as much as he would have liked to.

I have been playing around with his Nikon since he died a few months ago. It seems to have a lot of potential and I am pleased to have a new photographic device to pique my creative interests. The Nikon had a memory card inside when I got it, and on that card were some photographs. The digital numbering system indicated he had taken 82 photographs with the camera, taken sporadically over a couple of years. Not much, but the other day I was looking at the photos and I was intrigued to discover the content of these final photographs.

Some are throwaway shots, probably devoted to learning different functions of the camera. But number 12 and number 24 really struck me. The first is of a man in the ocean, taken from my dad's room at a Cuban resort he vacationed at with his wife, my stepmom, just after acquiring the camera. If I think not just of my dad taking the photograph but also about him not being here anymore, it gains a lot of emotional value.

Shot number 12

Shot number 24 is even more interesting. My dad often put my stepmom, Jean, in his photographs, usually as a way of adding a subject to an interesting landscape. I have seen her face the camera as well as turn away from it in a variety of shots. What is fascinating in shot number 24 is that not only does she face away from the camera, but this is also the only photograph of her on this camera. Jean died just over a year ago, almost one year before my dad died. Therefore, this is the final shot of Jean from my dad's camera, a shot that has her turn away from the photographer and from the viewer and instead contemplate her own existence 'out there.' Again, the emotional effect is compounded by what I know now.

Shot number 24

Photography can be so fascinating. It has the ability to affect us on deep emotional levels by triggering our sense-making mechanisms. It can haunt us even though it is our ability to rationalize that haunts us. The last shot, number 82, is an ugly shot. It is of a microwave with its door opened, which I can see is the one from his apartment that we moved him into last November. It is a sad, lonely, out of focus shot. There is nothing in the microwave, and the time on its panel says it is 1:34. There are no shots before it that suggest the circumstances for taking it. It makes me sad to think of this final shot, to consider the object of his attention that day near the end of his life at 1:34. I guess what is interesting is that I cause my own sadness by putting this shot in context of what has happened since, a connection he surely would not have made (but who knows?). I don't like this photograph at all. I don't even want to reproduce it here, because it contains more than any sight of it could ever convey. It is like an artifact that has lost its inherent purpose and is now dying an excruciatingly slow entropic death.