Photographs capture moments, freeze them inside a frame so we could stare at them for a lifetime. One photograph can speak a thousand things. It can read a mind, read the eyes hiding a smile, a tear, a bit of jealousy or a spark of love. A photo can bring a person we’ ve never seen before but heard of how good he or she was to life. A tiny human weakness; some memories, no matter how beautiful, tend to fade from our human memory over time. Now this is why sometimes, photographs are a‘ can’ t- do-without’, one look at the capture, the faces which were not so fat as now, the dress you wore on that day, your favourite heeled shoe back then, the ones who were once your closest who are no more there with you, how happy you were when it happened, will all come flooding down to your memory and will never let them fade away. Not to forget, that some photographs could make you feel so nostalgic, longing for what and who you miss now.
62 BEST SPEAKER MAGAZINE 2017
Nevertheless, Photographs are a way of holding the ones we love closer to our hearts, when they are physically distancing, and sometimes, emotionally too. We carry them inside lockets, between pages of our favourite books, and pockets of ripped jeans. Sometimes, the first thing we wake up to, is a photo of the people we hold dear, fixed in the blank wall across the bed so we could stare for hours when life gets hard. Photographs also remind you how far you’ ve come because they capture and hold still the best days of our lives. As life goes, they go on too, photos of when you were a freckle faced kid with messy hair to the day you heard wedding bells with the love of your life, and have your own freckle faced children, while in between are millions of tiny memories, captured and frozen still inside the pages of a photo album. Ed Sheeran was right.‘ We keep this love in a photograph. We make these memories for ourselves. Our eyes are never closing, hearts are never broken and time’ s forever frozen still.’
My far wandering mind comes to the‘ now’. I’ m standing in front of a 70-yearold Mahogany cabinet at my ancestral home. On it, are several photographs. Monochrome pictures of my late grandfather in London and my father when he was just a toddler, one with my siblings when I was only ten and they were seven and five years, photos of my family, taken during vacations, wedding photographs of my parents, my cousins and their babies. And of course, my most favourite ones out of all, the photograph of my mother’ s graduation and right behind it, 23 years later, the photo of my own graduation.
Gavelier KAVINDI PIYADASA
Faculty of Social Sciences