The power of a photograph to convey joy across a lifetime

I found a photograph I hadn't seen in 15 years. I was organizing my desk at work and discovered a glossy snapshot from 1991 inexplicably interleaved with dull and official papers.

Picture this: my best friend from high school, Bonnie, throws me a wedding shower at her house on Long Island.

This is a shower for a second marriage, so there are no games of "bridal bingo" (for second marriages, you play "bridal Russian roulette") and there are no accessories made out of toilet paper. There are no rules about whether breaking a ribbon when unwrapping a gift means you'll have babies, with a result that ribbons are cut as decisively as Gordian knots, even as the bonds between the celebrants are strengthened.

There's a lot of wine for those who want it and such an abundance of delicious food that even if you don't actually want it you cannot help yourself from helping yourself. There is also a lot of laughter. This laughter differed from the laughter I heard at showers for younger brides (including the one for my first wedding) insofar as this laughter is genuine.

This is the deep, loud, real laughter of adult women, and not the half-embarrassed silver-bell tinkling giggling you'd have heard when a 20-year-old was given a peignoir from Frederick's of Hollywood by her grandmother.

At Bonnie's house in 1991, we roared until we wiped mascara off our eyes and had to whack each other on the back because we were afraid somebody would choke on a pignoli cookie from being unable to stop laughing.

As the bride-to-be, I sit at the center of the group. True, in itself this is not unusual. What is unusual is the chair in which I sit. It's an astonishing creation constructed for the occasion by Bonnie and her brother Frankie.

It's an enormous fan-back, white wicker chair almost entirely veiled in gauze that hangs from the ceiling, which frames my very big 1990s hair. You'd think that would be enough, but the truly interesting part of the picture is that eviscerated Barbie dolls split in two are glued to the chair, so that the heads and upper torsos are neatly juxtaposed with the V-legged lower torsos.

I look like a bridal version of Kurtz the ivory trader in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

In the photograph, my head with its big hair is thrown back, my eyes are closed and my mouth is wide open in a tremendous laugh. It is not a glamour shot. Yet the picture captured an instant of hilarity that reconnected me to a moment 25 years ago while making me profoundly happy as I sat in my basement office, holding the shiny square of paper.

This is what women look like when we're really laughing, I thought. This was me, and us, all those years ago. This is me, and us, still. What a luxury.

I took a photograph of the photograph (I'm that clever) and put it up on my Facebook page. Friends posted their own family photographs, most talking about the sheer physical pleasure of holding a photograph and their worries that the next generation won't have the same tactile satisfactions.

As Melissa B. Mork posted, "My son, who's 12, has no baby pictures or snapshots of his childhood. Instead, we have a junk drawer full of SD cards. For his HS graduation party rather than a clever montage of photos projected on a screen, I will just give him a necklace with SD cards hanging from it like charms. Maybe the old iPhone 4 can be the pendant."

Not that she's bitter.

The difference between photographs and real life was summed up best not by an art critic, but by a British politician: "Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure." Tony Benn, member of Parliament and brilliant rhetorician, got it right.

The best photographs are the ones that initially make us gasp, widen our eyes, shut our eyes or laugh. It's not the posed, poised portrait photographs we most passionately cherish but those images that, like love, joy, generosity or grace, catch us entirely unawares.

Gina Barreca
The Hartford Courant
(TNS)

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Gina Barreca is a columnist for The Hartford Courant.