Reading · More or Less About the Photo

At some point in high school, we must have been talking about how we thought that we would die, and I made a joke that a fortune teller predicted my death. She said that it would be while sailing around the world in my 50s. My fifties seemed so far away when I was under 18.

I picked this photo because it serves as an archetype for what I want to achieve in my photos: a painterly idealism and lonely peacefulness that speaks to the wonders of this world.

Somehow, what started as a throwaway joke took on weight and settled in my mind as a kind of warning. This year I arrive at that predicted age, and while I’ve avoided sailboats like the plague ever since, for the past several years I’ve been thinking about what will happen.

I know that must sound silly to most of you, but in a way, it has helped me come to terms with the idea that we all pass away. That’s not easy when you see family, friends, and acquaintances getting sick and passing away around you. Hitting home, there’s been another cancer diagnosis in my family, and a friend recently passed away. I’ve always mentally understood that this time in my life will come about, and people talk about when you get to a certain age, those around you get there too, and it’s only a matter of time before they start dropping around you.

But, here I am, and it’s still shocking.

I picked this photo because it shows me sitting on a rock in the Boundary Waters while you and your mom where sleeping in the tent. I often feel most myself when I’m alone and outside.

I don’t know if I’ll die this year while sailing around the world. I don’t know if sailing means sailing or means paddling or means Lake Superior or means a raft or means on a river or means just living my life. Like making a photograph, it’s easy to assign meaning once you’re looking back at it, but harder to understand its meaning while taking it.

At any rate, I’ve been preparing. Many of my friends have bought big toys, had more adventures, and spent a lot of what they’ve earned. I’ve watched in envy and wondered if I would have done something similar had my circumstances been slightly different. But we had a kid, despite being later in life and learning it wasn’t likely. We had been preparing for a big bike trip, but with his birth, my mindset changed. If I was only going to live into my 50s, I needed to save money to help his future, and I’ve set everything aside.

I picked this one of your mom, because at this time we didn’t think that we’d be able to have you, and despite how hard that was, your mom still embraced the joy in life. Even a rainy day couldn’t stop her smile.

Now, I’m here in this year. Statistically, I’m unlikely to die. A high school joke isn’t likely to kill me, but I feel like I need to make decisions about what to pass along.

I have around a thousand articles published online and in print that aren’t backed up on my hard drives. I’ve already lost hundreds of short stories, novels, and hundreds of poems on old, long-gone floppy disks. Even this essay is fragile—living only on Substack and in your inbox. It’s not printed, not saved for my son, or stored anywhere I control. It will likely disappear.

I have boxes and boxes of slides. During the last move, I lost all my black and white negatives—some I still wish I had. I have a digital image catalog nearing 250,000 images. There are thousands of great images in that catalog. But how do I pick what to preserve?

How do you choose what matters, knowing most of it won’t last anyway? It’s much easier to see what mattered later after everything else has fallen away.

Over that last decade or so, I’ve watched my dad scan old slides and photos and compile the family history. On my computer, I have several photos and a pdf of the family history that I haven’t read. In my closet somewhere, I have a giant roll of paper that my dad made documenting the family genealogy on one side of my family that goes back over 1,250 years.

That feels just as imaginary as the fortune teller.

I picked this one because it’s you eating what you usually do while in the Boundary Waters, and despite the cold and rain, you still have a great time.

I remember as a kid sitting on the back bedroom floor at my grandparents’ house, built on Asbury Street in Dubuque, Iowa, in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, in a section of town that my grandpa developed—he developed over a square mile of the town—with my cousin looking through an old shoe box of faded and corner-torn black and white photos. The musty smell of old photos long stored filled the air along with dust, and I wondered who they were. Even then, so close to their lives, they were lost to our memories.

That’s what this essay is. The six photos that I’ve included are like that musty shoe box full of black and white photos. These six are the ones that if I had to choose at this moment—today’s version of me—I’d pass along to my son to keep until he was an adult. To remember my work by.

But maybe that’s not the important part, because if I were to pass away this year, what I left behind isn’t in those photos. It’s how I raised him, the time we spent together, and what I tried to pass along through photography, through teaching, through being out there.

Ultimately, few of us will be remembered outside of our family and most of us will only be remembered by our children, grandchildren, and if lucky our great grandchildren. While the famous among us will be remembered longer, I know I’m not one of those. If somehow despite my best effort to not want a gravestone I end up with one, this is what I’d want it to read:

Bryan Hansel took a few photos, loved his family, and tried to live up to his ideals. He rests here until someone digs up the cemetery in pursuit of empty progress.

The Photos We Leave Behind

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