Melissa Kelly is a Photographer and Misfit based in the Philadelphia metro area and working everywhere.
My earliest memory is not a memory. It’s a photograph.
I’m fourteen months old, and I’m tottering around the skeleton of a house, weaving through the ribs of a load-bearing wall. It’s my young parents’ first home, a built-to-order genetic twin to all the houses that surround it. They are twenty-one and terrified; this home is the second most exciting-but-frightening thing they have ever done. New adults. New baby. New house. Everything about our young family is new, new, new.
I know the details of the frequent trips by the house because I’ve heard the story so many times. I know that blue Camaro because it still lives in my dad’s garage. I know I am fourteen months old because the words “August 1985” are written on the back of the photo in my mother’s looping, undemanding handwriting.
This particular photograph is one of many thousands from my lifetime, and it lives in July 1985 to December 1986 album with its contemporaries. That album is aging on the upper left of the bookcase full of albums. Its adhesive has long since become un-stuck, plastic pulling away and freeing photos to slide down the page and collect along the bottom. It is not a memory (I think?), but it is so firmly a part of my history, that the two cannot be disentangled — photograph from memory or memory from the photograph.
Between my shutter-bug grandfather and my scrapbooking mother, photography and family histories run deep in my veins. My grandfather bought me my first point and shoot film camera for my 9th or 10th birthday, and the rest is history. A decade later, I was pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Photojournalism at Temple University in Philadelphia, and have been shooting professionally ever since.
I believe in photography.
I believe in capturing our lives for our future selves to remember, and for our future generations to discover. I believe in cell phone photos of our biggest and smallest moments, AND professional versions of highly orchestrated family portraits. I believe in photography — after all, photography is proof for eternity that we lived, we loved, and we were loved in return.