Roland Barthes

This picture is the preservation of time. In that instant, the family has been captured and forever will remain alive. This photograph revealing a mother with her two children and their two pets is not simply a keepsake; it is the essence of who these people are in that precise moment in time. The mother, barely smiling, aloof, and looking not directly into the camera seems to be lost in thought. The youngest daughter, stoic, and stern, without even the slightest bit of a smile is half crumpling her left hand and holding a toy in her right. The middle daughter is the only one smiling, and looking directly into the camera with her cat slung over her hand. The dog is showing interest in perhaps the only happy one in the shot. This family is the accurate representation of family. The light reflects unaltered from them onto the film. In the short instant of the shutter opening and closing they have been. The dog whether it dies or not, always was a dog and through this photograph will always be a dog. Such is the same with the cat, the trees, the grass, the houses etc. They all live within the photograph. We of course know this because the same light that has touched them has graced the medium that produced the image. They are defined by the pose however more so than they are defined by their possessions. What can be read in the pose is what makes this a photograph. What is the photographs intention? Little has to do with whether the father placed them in that order or if the girls decided to grab their favorite things and line-up as such. What matters is in that instant the pose was captured and forever it remains unalterable. The time is separate from the present because it is a picture made in the past but as a pose it remains in the present. This photograph represents the very essence of life. The mother in the picture, although a symbol, is immortalized in this photograph. Her essence along with her children’s essence remains a symbol of their existence long after the photograph is taken. In that moment the pose has been extracted, revealed and mounted in reality. Thusly they can be cherished through what the photograph symbolizes. They photograph is a symbol of family extracted from the rays of a loving family on a grassy hill with their beloved pets.

All of these pictures I snagged from the internet. I find that they are similar to the original in the fact that they all symbolize family. And yeah, I got walruses.