La Voz de Galicia – 21 de xuño, 2026 →
I think the last time I made a personal photo album (one of those with real printed photos developed in a shop) I was still a teenager. It’s curious, because just as I don’t like looking at albums from my own past (they are so carefully stored away that I don’t even know where they are, thank goodness), I am happy to look at the ones my mother made over the years. Thanks to them, I can understand the narrative that led her to become who she is, or that led her to stop being who she once was. The photos from her childhood in Berredo are very few—perhaps two or three, no more. Her photographic life begins with her emigration at seventeen: the health certificate photo, the passport photo, and then the pictures from her life in Venezuela, her change in style (her hair, the way she dressed), photos with sisters, friends, at the beach, out for walks… And in that life album, my father soon appears—whom she met there in Caracas—and with whom she had my older sister, Teté, also there in Caracas. From that point on, in my mother’s photo albums, she gradually disappears to make way for us, her four daughters. The albums stop being a summary of her life and become a summary of ours: photos of babies, baptisms, First Communions…
I was thinking about that these days when I was clearing out my mobile phone for the umpteenth time. Full of photos I take in passing so I won’t forget, photos that aren’t really photos but notes about something, photos meant to preserve special moments… And what will happen to that hard drive that has been storing my life for the past fifteen years? What will happen to that digital memory into which we offload our own? It will probably disappear, because unlike my mother, I have never sat down to process (in the form of an album) the life events that sustain our lives…
