What Time Does to Meaning
A photograph takes a fraction of a second.
1/125th, perhaps.
It doesn't seem like much.
Until you understand that the moment on either side of it is already gone.
I have thought about that a great deal lately.
I've been looking through portraits I made years ago and photographing some of those people again.
Then and now.
At first, the obvious thing is change.
Children grow.
Teeth disappear and grow back.
Haircuts improve. Mostly.
Bodies change.
Families change.
People move countries, marry, arrive, leave.
And some people die.
But looking at these photographs again has made me realise that change isn't really what interests me.
It is what time does to meaning.
The photograph itself hasn't changed.
But we have.
I have a portrait of a tiny boy being steadied by one finger.
When I made it, I knew exactly what I was doing.
I knew what that finger meant.
Smallness. Dependence. A little human being who still needed somebody to keep him upright.
Years later, there he is again.
Older.
Standing on his own.
The first photograph means something more now because I know what came afterwards.
Time has added another layer.
It does that to photographs.
Loss is part of this.
I don't mean only death.
We lose things every day.
A season ends.
A child loses a tooth.
Someone gets a terrible haircut.
A favourite jersey stops fitting.
We leave a house.
A voice changes.
Children stop needing to be steadied by one finger.
The everyday things disappear so quietly that most of the time we don't even notice them going.
Every day that passes is gone.
Every hour.
Every moment.
Perhaps that sounds sad.
I don't think it is.
I think knowing this makes life more precious.
My mother died when I was 30.
Too early.
Losing her, and later my father, changed the way I understood photographs.
It also changed what I wanted to photograph.
Relationships.
Not simply what somebody looked like.
Who they belonged to.
Who loved whom.
How they stood together.
How a mother looked at her child.
The hand on a shoulder.
The finger keeping a baby upright.
For years, some people probably thought I was a little strange about photographs.
Others understood immediately.
I had learned that there isn't always later.
Tonight, on the eve of my first hip replacement, my son made a funny video of me walking on my tired bones.
It is funny.
Tomorrow, I hope it will be even funnier.
But there is another thought sitting quietly underneath it.
What if I don't wake up?
We don't know when our time is up.
I made what could theoretically be my last meal for my son.
"Is that all?" he asked.
"Guess what? I've made more, just in case."
Of course I have.
My updated will is lying on the dining-room table, waiting to be witnessed before I leave for hospital.
And life carries on around it.
Dinner.
Laughing.
A silly video.
Paperwork on a table.
The completely ordinary stuff of being alive.
That is the bit I don't want to miss.
When I look at photographs I made twenty years ago, I know things now that I couldn't possibly have known then.
I knew what I had captured.
I didn't know what it would come to mean.
None of us does.
We cannot know which photograph will one day contain someone we desperately wish we could see again.
We cannot know which ordinary expression will become precious.
We cannot know that the little hand we barely noticed will one day be a man's hand.
We cannot know which kitchen, bad haircut, missing tooth, ridiculous laugh or familiar embrace we will ache to have back for just a minute.
That knowledge comes later.
Time has a high interest rate.
Perhaps that is why I have never believed a portrait is only about what somebody looks like.
It is evidence.
You were here.
We were here.
We loved each other like this.
This was your face.
This was my body.
This was our family.
This was Tuesday.
And we had no idea how precious Tuesday would become.
A photograph cannot stop time.
Thank goodness.
Life is supposed to move.
Children are supposed to grow.
Seasons are supposed to end.
We are supposed to change.
And loss, in all its forms, is inevitable.
But for 1/125th of a second, I can say:
This.
This happened.
This mattered.
Keep it.
Because a photograph records a moment.
Time writes the rest of the story.
JOHANNESBURG PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER
One Moment. One Portrait. Forever
© 2005–2026 Bridget Corke Photography
Blairgowrie · Johannesburg · South Africa
International Master's in Portrait Photography
One of only two in Africa.