Nowadays, photography is everywhere. Literally, everywhere we look, we can spot images of random things and persons. There are pictures up in billboards; in different books and magazines; in shopping malls; online; and in our own houses. This might be because photography isn’t as uncommon as it was like in the past. We might have recently saw its essence of documenting moments that we may, someday, want to look back on.
Maxine Hong Kingston, in this selection, was exactly doing just that. She was scanning some old pictures of her parents back when they were happy as a clam, in the hopes of discerning what may have caused their conflicts at the present. She inferred a lot of things about her parents. She noted that they both have two very distinct and large personalities or cultures based on the pictures that each took. Her father took pictures of events wherein he was all dressed up or wherein he was with his friends. Her mother, on the other hand, preferred to take pictures, of important once-in-a-lifetime events only. Through small differences like these, Kingston was able to deduce how her dad was more of the fun-loving and outgoing type while her mom was more of the serious and long-term thinking type.
I’ve heard the saying that “A picture is worth a thousand words” before, but I was actually amazed at how Kingston was able to discover a great deal about her parents. Maybe I should try that once for myself. Take a random picture and just admire its simplicity and try to decipher more out of it.
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