Immortalized

I read a story awhile back by a woman talking about the moment she knew that her marriage was over. I can't remember the details of the story - if she and her husband had been drifting apart or if he'd been cheating on her or if he'd woken up one day and announced out of the blue that he didn't love her anymore. What I remember is that after he'd gone, she was looking through a photo album and realized that she wasn't in it. Her husband was the photographer in their relationship, and while he'd snapped hundreds of pictures of their children and friends and family, he never took any photographs of her. She said that it was a revelation to her - that she had not mattered to him, that when he recorded his life, he didn't include her in it.

It's kind of a stupid story - symbolic, psychological mumbo-jumbo. But the story struck me. I take hundreds of pictures of my children, but rarely pictures of other people. Do these people not matter to me? When I'm old and spend most of my time squinting at photo albums and print-outs of my blog, don't I want to remember what they looked like? Won't my children and grandchildren want to know what I looked like?

So I've been making a concerted effort lately to take more photos of people other than my three sons, and to ask Michael to take photos of me. Unfortunately, we keep ending up with photos that look like this:

"Why are you taking a picture of me?"

Is this really a look we want immortalized?

Thank you, double chin.

A ton of shots taken from this angle - me looking up at Michael.