Celebrated in China and across many East and Southeast Asian communities and their diaspora across the world, Mid-Autumn is a time for families to gather, admire the full moon and share mooncakes. It is also a time to think of loved ones who are far away.
When being together is not possible, photographs help us keep our family close. A familiar face on a wall or a picture beside the bed can make someone far away feel part of everyday life.
Yet so many of those pictures now sit unseen on our phones. We capture a smile, a family meal, a moment between generations. Perhaps we share it in a message. Then it slips down the camera roll, buried beneath hundreds of newer images which include the inevitable lunch, dinner or dessert.
It has never been easier to capture and keep the moments we cherish. But the sheer number of pictures can make looking back feel like a task we never quite get around to. We save them because they matter, then rarely give ourselves time to enjoy them.
As people around the world make time to be together this Mid-Autumn, perhaps we can also spend a few minutes revisiting photographs of those we wish were here. An ordinary afternoon, a shared joke, or for me, a picture I took of my dad and my eldest son who was three years old at the time, sitting together in my dad’s favourite chair… sometimes we only understand the value of a photograph long after we have taken it.
So what can we do? Well, the same technology that helps us collect these pictures can help us enjoy them. Wireless printing takes photographs straight from a phone to paper. Online services turn a selection into an album or book, while shared digital albums and connected photo frames let families enjoy pictures across the world as they do in our family.
Start with a handful. Print one for your wall. Send another to someone who was there. Add names, a date and a few words about what you remember. An imperfect photograph of someone laughing may mean more than the carefully posed picture beside it.
A photograph cannot bring everyone back around the same table, but it can give someone we miss a place in our daily lives again.
Happy mid-autumn Dad, wherever you are!
The impossible, made possible.
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