between the things

My son is almost two. Most of what I want to remember about him happens between the pictures.

In the kitchen, late afternoon, he lifts a piece of bread, pauses, looks at it, almost says something, decides not to, and eats. Five seconds. The pause is a moment. The almost-saying is a moment. The photograph keeps the bread.

I made Manumanu so I could keep those few seconds. It turns a burst into a moving photo — not a film, not an album, just a handful of frames in order, looping.

A photograph stops time, which is a kind of mercy. But it also steals motion, which is most of how a person actually exists in a room. The little arc of a hand. The breath before a laugh. A child looking back from a doorway because someone from the other room said his name. We tend to keep what photographs well. What photographs well is not always what was happening.

A film would carry the moment away, make an event of it. An album would ask for many pictures. A loop only asks for a few breaths, and lets the same few seconds come back: again, slightly different because we are different, but still there.

The picture you took at the birthday is the one for the frame. The one you didn't take — a child reaching back for someone's leg — is the one that would have held the afternoon. I think most of us have a small, private archive of those, and nowhere to put them.

This is the small place.