Are you always the one taking the Photograph
Most families have one. The person who is always behind the camera. The one who appears in almost none of the photographs but is responsible for most of them. The one who, at every gathering, every birthday, every ordinary Sunday that somehow felt worth recording, quietly appointed themselves the photographer and stayed there.
In my family that person was me.
It dawned on me recently, looking through old photographs, that I am barely in any of them. Not because I wasn't there. I was there for all of it. I just appointed myself the photographer early and stayed there, gathering after gathering, year after year. Part of it was not wanting to be in front of the lens myself. Like most people I was never entirely convinced I looked good in a photograph. Part of it was simpler than that, if someone was going to take the photograph, I wanted it to be half decent, and that meant it had to be me. Both reasons made complete sense at the time. Together they kept me out of the frame for decades.
What didn't make sense, what I couldn't see until much later, was what I was doing to my own place in the record. Every time I raised the camera I stepped out of the frame. Every time I got the shot I confirmed, quietly and without meaning to, that I was the less important one. The one who makes everyone else look good. The one the photograph doesn't need.
I told myself I wasn't comfortable in front of a camera anyway. Which was true. I told myself I was more valuable behind it. Which was also true. I told myself that the people in the frame mattered more than the person holding the camera. And there, without quite realising it, I had made myself insignificant in my own life.
That is a strange thing to sit with.
I think about this now when someone comes to me and says they have never had a proper portrait made. When they say they are not photogenic, or not comfortable in front of a camera, or that they are always the one taking the photographs rather than being in them. I understand that position from the inside in a way that has nothing to do with professional experience.
I also understand what it means to realise, later than you should have, that the absence of photographs is a kind of absence full stop. That the people who love you will one day go looking for evidence that you were there and find very little. That no photographs does not just mean no photographs. It means something quieter and harder than that.
You were there. You were present for all of it. You just kept stepping out of the frame.
This is me telling you to stop doing that.
Not because a photograph is the same as a life. It isn't. But because the people who come after you deserve to know what you looked like at this moment, in this life, when you were fully and completely yourself. And because you deserve, at least once, to be the subject rather than the one holding the camera.
Come and be in the photograph. I will make it worth your while.
Rod Cage is a fine art legacy portrait photographer based in Glenmore Park, Penrith, working across Western Sydney.