Lynn Cazabon

It’s a tiny picture, two by three inches. Inscribed in the white border is the date: 7-4-40. It is a picture of my father. He was three years old. I cannot help but think of what was happening in the world that day. The most widespread war in history had begun but there is my father, knowing nothing about it. He looks innocent. Dressed by his mother all in white, squinting in the sun, he radiates light. The picture itself appeals to me, its smallness, the high horizon line upon which tiny buildings are perched. Where is he? The handwritten text on the back answers this: Oakland Hills Country Club, in the western suburbs of Detroit, the city in which both he and I were born. I can see it is my father, by the resemblance in his face but mostly because of the way he stands: leaning slightly forward, his knees turning inward, his long arms hanging heavily at his side. In this stance I can see my father as I knew him, decades later. It is, as Roland Barthes described it, the punctum of this photograph for me. In that detail, I see the vulnerability of a person who I was afraid of for much of my childhood. And yet this image actually resembles my father as I knew him in the year before his death: frail, defenseless, and gentle. I am struck by how much time this little piece of paper represents, extending as it does from that day in 1940 until the day I acquired the album in which it was kept, upon his death at the age of 65. It also takes me to this present moment, reminding me how I managed to feel close to my father as a child: through an object, a machine. My father was a mechanical engineer. Secluded in his basement workshop, I sometimes watched as he repaired this and that apparatus, and I could see that he loved cameras. So I did too. He gave me my first camera. I was 12 years old. And here I am, still holding a camera.