Yearbook

They say a picture is worth 1000 words, but it is more often true that 1000 words evoke more than a picture ever could.

While doing some decluttering the other day, I came across my senior yearbook and flipped through it to revisit some of my younger years. The 77 Gate: a slim volume with a stylized red-on-white cover opening to a black-and-white photo album. Groups of students staged in varying arrays representing each class, sports team, and student organization (although unhelpfully identified by first initial, last name only). Faculty and staff in several columns of informal headshots. Pages of candid stills that don’t quite create a coherent story arc. Each senior devised their own page (a perk of having a small student body), and these showcased self-selected photos, an activities list, a favorite quote, and a paragraph of “dot-dots” meant to recall things we were known for (but fifty years later are mostly inscrutable); mine included my teen-age fashion caveat, “It’s a Sears original” and an inexplicable reference to “volleyball” which I never could play well.

The yearbook struck me as oddly still life, lacking in vibrancy. It generated fond smiles, sure, but it didn’t begin to capture the full experience of high school, the personalities of my friends, or the moments that I remember most. The amusing photo of the Chez Nous editing team doesn’t show the long hours putting together articles and using x-acto knives and rulers to lay out the newspaper for printing. The choir pages display formal group photos and a summary of performances, but they don’t talk about how finely tuned we were that year, with gorgeous harmonies and ethereal soloists, and they don’t recall our adventures, like the laughter-filled van ride in Washington, DC. The action shots of team sports don’t capture the screaming-on-the-sidelines moments and school spirit – or the lingering memory of the horrific car accident on the way to a field hockey game our sophomore year. Even though the pictures are set on campus, they don’t evoke the sense of place I can still feel when I go back there in my imagination. The handwritten messages from those who signed my yearbook testify to relationships and memories a bit more, but these are necessarily short and often messages of farewell. 

I can’t help but wish we had filled the yearbook with heart-felt reflections and deep-dive articles to remind us of the events, the emotions, the experiences we hoped would linger when we look back from future decades.

There’s something magical in the power of words.

Many of us have thousands of photographs, from special occasions, to well-plated meals, to holiday shenanigans, to everyday selfies, which our cloud and social media providers organize into “yearbooks” with no indication of the significance of each year’s photo stream. On social media, we make “stories,” but these tend to be carousels of pictures, with little more than captions or musical selections to indicate what the deeper story is.

Perusing pictures taken by my brother’s family on their trip to Italy, or the photographs captured at my niece’s wedding, or the candid snapshot albums posted to Facebook – these all provide tantalizing glimpses into others’ lives, but I can’t help but want to know more of their personal experiences of these days.

My friends and I – as we grow older – have all commented about how picture boxes from our parents, or even from our childhoods, are not meaningful (or particularly bequeathable) – and people, place, and events are often not even identifiable. Still, we hesitate to throw these photo collections away; there’s a sense of something precious missing and we have no way to find what that is. I can only imagine what will be lost when what people inherit is a trove of thousands of everyday digital photos with no hints of which are artifacts from truly impactful events and relationships.

In my vacation blogging (a habit over the last 20 years or so), I’ve captured musings that are part photo journal, part travelogue, and part rumination. My posts bring me right back to those days in ways that snapshots and searching my memories don’t. Still, I notice that they capture much more of the ‘what’ than the wonder. I could have shared more about how those gorgeous landscapes, inspiring art works, small town wanderings, and interesting people impacted me.

Now that I’ve thought about this, I challenge myself, and I challenge you, to take time to create short essays, voice recordings, or revealing captions for those photographs that constitute a scrapbook of your most personally important days. Quote little kids so that when they are big kids and adults looking back on their childhoods, they gain insight into their still-forming personalities from back then. Future generations will revel in hearing inner voices and learning more of the details and sentiment of those days.

We take pictures to capture memories, but they don’t carry meaning in their metadata. If we hope our future selves or our descendants will take away more than still life, if we want to treasure our yearbooks and photo albums and scrapbooks and desire them to carry some deep significance forward, then we – I as well – should add at least 1000 words.