Pictures to Remember

There is a lake outside our house, and my wife walks beside it every day. From the path you can see the water and, past it, the city, and it is a good view. I have walked there with her about five times in two years, and every time she has stopped to photograph it, as if the pictures from every other walk might have come out wrong.

I avoid the walk if I can, and the reason is the stopping. A walk with her is really a series of short walks between photographs. She sees something, the phone comes up, and I stand there with the patience of a man who has done this before and knows how it ends. To me, the stops are ridiculous. To her, they aren't ridiculous at all, and neither of us has ever managed to persuade the other.

Not long ago I went anyway. We hadn't gone far before she stopped to photograph the city across the water, the same view she has photographed on every walk I have ever been on. Then she turned the phone around for a selfie of the two of us. I said something. I don't remember the words, only that it was the kind of thing I always say, and that she answered the way she always does.

"You can't let me enjoy something I like."

She sounds sad when she says it, and annoyed, and she is not entirely wrong. Then she takes the picture, and we walk on, and a little further along she stops again.

I have never seen her decide something wasn't worth photographing. I decide that about almost everything, so between the two of us we have it covered.

The pictures go out into the world: Instagram, the family WhatsApp group, her friends. This was my original objection. I don't like the idea of my life being on display, and I assumed that was what the camera was for.

But that isn't where the pictures end up. They end up with her, in bed, scrolling back. I have watched her do it, going through weeks and months, sometimes years. She isn't posting anything, just looking. When I've asked why, her answer is always the same: to remember. This was inconvenient for my argument, so I moved on to a different one.

Sometimes, late at night, my phone lights up with a picture from her. Just us, somewhere, months or years ago. She has been back there, and brought something to show me.

My new argument is that I don't need a picture of everything, because I remember. She sends a picture from a restaurant, and I can tell her what we had for dessert, or which movie we saw that night. She is always impressed, and so, if I'm honest, am I. And if one day I forget what I ate on a Wednesday, I tell her, that is not the worst tragedy in the world.

I grew up photographed. England, Bangladesh, Canada: there are pictures of me at every stage, of the occasions worth going back to. Nobody photographed me eating dinner on a Wednesday. I still go through those albums. My wife has very few pictures of her childhood. I have known this for years.

She considers herself a photographer, and she has tried to teach me. When I'm holding the phone she tells me how to frame the shot, where to stand, how to position her in it. I am not good at it, and I don't get better, partly because I don't try. When she shows me the result, I tell her she looks good in all of them.

It is a way of getting out of the lesson, and it has the advantage of being true.

In person she doesn't make long arguments. She keeps it to short jibes about how unexcited I am whenever the camera comes out. "I am a photographer," she tells me, "and you won't let me be." There is a steady supply of these. The longer case arrives on my phone: memes, reels, anything she finds that says taking pictures is a good thing. She never adds a word of her own and lets the internet argue for her.

One morning it was a meme. Handwritten text on a yellow background, telling me I would never regret taking more pictures of the people I love. Take the blurry ones, it said. Take the ones where nobody is ready. I read it as a closing argument, and it made me more annoyed, not less, which I suspect is not what the yellow background was going for.

When none of it works, she pouts and tells me she wishes I was different, which is a fair wish.

I don't mind a picture when I think it's needed, because everyday life is for living and not every moment needs to be captured. The trouble is that I'm the one deciding which ones are, and I am a very strict judge.

There is a picture from before our wedding, from the Holud Rong Khela, a Bangladeshi wedding tradition: a paint war with close family and friends. It took me a while to find it among the thousands that were taken. She is in a yellow saree with paint on her face. Her smile is mischievous, and she looks genuinely happy.

I remember a great deal about that day. I don't remember her smiling like that. I know it from the picture.

She would say this proves her point, and about my memory she may be right. I would still say it was a wedding, exactly the kind of occasion I have always said deserves a camera, and nobody had to photograph a Wednesday dinner to get that smile. She is going to keep photographing everything, and I know I can't fight that. The next time she stops by the lake, I will be standing to the side, waiting, but I will try not to look annoyed.